Social Innovation in Health Care

Australia's health system has largely been exempt from social innovation since the middle part of the twentieth century. From that time, mutual health funds stopped being innovators in health care and became simple insurance houses, while state health departments began absorbing hospitals and clinics that had previously been established by independent social organisations, such as charitable and memership-based organisations, and friendly societies.

The result after half a century, is that we have a health system that is run almost exclusively by bureaucrats and managers, in both public and private sectors, without either innovation or competition in the interests of the consumer. It is a provider-centred, bureaucracy-driven system, characterised by bewildering complexity, fragmentation, waste, escalating costs, and is oriented to the management of illness rather than the management of well-being.

In the UK, groups of consumers and practitioners such as nurses are being encouraged to take over components of the National Health System and run them in new and innovative ways. They are being actively encouraged to break up bits of the NHS and run them as a social enterprises. Nothing remotely like this is on the agenda in Australia - all political parties from left to right share a statist set of assumptions about the organisation of health care which preclude social innovation being part of the health reform process.

I am interested in connecting with people interested in exploring opportunities for social innovation in the Australian health system which shift capacity, resources, information and power to consumers and away from managers and providers, for the purpose of illness prevention and good health maintenance, and away from the management of illness.

Self-directed services and personal budgets for the purposes of self-care and self-management have great potential for people with chronic illness, ageing needs, and mental illness. Self-management tools can readily be developed for people in these categories that break the passive-client-of-multiple-providers syndrome.