In July 1998, the Commonwealth Department of Health and Family Services commissioned the Centre for Health Economics Research and Evaluation (CHERE) to identify and document Hospital in the Home (HITH) care models nationally and internationally. The purpose of this consultancy was to examine the appropriateness of this form of care for acutely ill patients and to make recommendations about how to increase the utilisation and cost effectiveness of services. Hospital in the Home is emerging internationally and within Australia as a viable alternative form of provision of acute care. The benefits of HITH have generally been seen in terms of its capacity to provide a cost-effective and acceptable alternative to hospital inpatient care, which reduces pressure on hospital beds. However, so far there has only been limited evaluation to lend support to these claims. Over the past decade a wide range of hospital in the home programs have been introduced across the Australian health care system. These programs have often emerged in response to local factors and have a range of different purposes, funding and organisational arrangements, and varying levels of success. In some states hospital in the home has been formalised into a program, whereas in other parts of Australia the introduction of HITH has been left to local decision makers. Thus, the experience of HITH has been extremely variable. It is appropriate at this stage to draw together information about what services are available, how acceptable these services are and what they have achieved. This information is important for determining the future directions of HITH in Australia, as well as providing a valuable resource for service providers and policy makers.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by CHERE, University of Technology, Sydney in its series Research Reports with number
13.
Find related papers by JEL classification: I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)