Defining and Measuring Health Poverty

Professor Philip Clarke is Director of Centre for Health Policy at University of Melbourne. Previously, Prof Clarke held positions at the Sydney School of Public Health and at the University of Oxford. His research interest include evaluating policies to improve the management of people with chronic diseases such as diabetes, health inequalities and the use of simulation models to inform health economic evaluation. He has also undertaken policy relevant research for the World Bank, OECD, AusAID and DoH and is on the Lancet Commission on Diabetes.

Abstract

The seminar will focus on recent collaborative research with Guido Erreygers which aims to:

(1) elaborate how the concept of ‘health poverty’ can be defined and measured, and;

(2) apply this methodology to study health poverty in a variety of cases. Although not entirely new, the notion of health poverty is seldom used – in contrast to the notion of income poverty. After examining measures of income poverty such as the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) class of poverty indicators we consider how they can be employed with health measures such as the risk of chronic diseases and mortality. We use this approach to obtain a robust estimate of the extent of health poverty in Australia and attempt to measure its evolution over time using data from the HILDA’s survey.

Event details