Outcomes and Utilisation Research Group (OUR)

Professor D’Arcy Holman heads the Outcomes and Utilisation Research Group (OUR), one of the two teams comprising CHSR. Major areas of interest for this group include:

• Optimising health care for chronic diseases such as diabetes, asthma, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental illness
• Equity in access to health care, such as the effects of social and location disadvantage, and use of private health cover
• Illness-related patterns of migration, that is whether people relocate in order to seek treatment for an illness
• Reproductive technology, pharmaceutical agents, genomic medicine and other areas of rapid technological change
• Palliative care and patterns of care near the end of life
• The effects on disease outcome of early intervention and improved primary care (general practitioner diagnosis/intervention)
• The development of research infrastructure in data linkage and spatial analysis, as well as new methods of analysis
• Family studies of health, illness and treatment
• Evaluation of prevention and screening programs

OUR Aims

• Development of methods for analysing linked administrative health data
• Describing epidemiology of health service use in various population groups
• Measuring equity in and access to health care services
• Studying the effect of policy on equity and access to health care services

OUR Achievements

• A cohort-crossover study of travellers’ thrombosis in passengers arriving on international flights (1)
• Adverse trends and access to treatment of ischaemic heart disease in mental health patients (2)
• Inequities in access to breast reconstruction in women having undergone mastectomy (3)
• Increasing readmissions driven by new technology in the treatment of ureteric calculi (4)
• The increasing ‘active prevalence’ of cancer with wider use of chemotherapy to postpone death (5)
• Trends in use of health care resources in the last year of life (6)
• Studies of the effect of health policy on private health insurance (7)
• Specific methodologic developments, which include:
  • The back-casting model to correct for prevalent pool artefact in first-time incidence rates based on linked multi-event data (8)
  • The use of case distribution designs to estimate effects of index procedures and health events on short-term readmission risks (9)
    

To Contact Us