Mapping our healthcare system

THE AUSTRALIAN HEALTHCARE SYSTEM The Australian healthcare system is dauntingly complex. To understand it you need a good map, and this book, now updated to a 2nd edition, is an excellent map. Most structural aspects, such as funding arrangements; provider configuration including hospitals, primary care and public health; and policy issues such as workforce and health system design, are described clearly and concisely using a systems framework.

Arguably, there is no one else who has had the range of experience of travelling through and, on occasion, steering the Australian healthcare system than the author. Professor Duckett is a leading health services academic and has been our most senior health bureaucrat. He brings an operations research, economic, managerial, policy and a particular political perspective to the task.

No one, of course, writes a book exactly as a reviewer would have. Given the author’s background, I would have appreciated more on his perspective of the role of politics and process in shaping the health system over the past 20 years. Perhaps that will be another book — a 21st-century version of the seminal 1984 book by the late Sydney Sax, A strife of interests: politics and policies in Australian health services (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1984).

The present work will contribute most as a textbook for postgraduate students in public health and health services management, for whom it is already a standard text. However, all clinicians would benefit from a deeper understanding of the Australian healthcare system and how it provides the construct for their clinical work. This book is a good place for them to start that journey.

Johannes U StoelwinderOrthopaedic Surgeon Chair of Health Services Management Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, VIC