In consulting, you have to remain at the forefront of many different areas of your field. Mental health is a nation-wide public health priority and thus a hot topic for many organisations that we work with in health and social services. Being informed about all the sectors we work across is one of our core values.

Economics can certainly add the ‘oomph’ factor. Economic tools deal with how well (or poorly) we are using available resources from dollars to human capital, and as the old saying goes ‘there is more than one way to cook an egg’. In the last blog within our Health Economist series, we draw on a couple of examples to show how they can be used to help commissioning organisations.

Resource-based allocation exercises, such as the one we discussed in our previous blogs can be powerful catalysts for moving towards outcomes-based commissioning as it puts a transparent funding formula supported by the best available evidence on the co-design table.

In the real world of service delivery, economic principles are problem-solving tools that use data and modelling to support both strategic and programmatic decisions. They should bring about ‘aha moments’ with insights that managers and program staff can put into practice to achieve their intended vision and goals.

We recently finished up some work with a client partner to refresh their clinical governance framework. Along the way, we learnt a few things that we think are worth sharing with other health and social service providers about how to make governance better serve the important work they do.

The most recent estimate of the size of corporate philanthropy in Australia totalled over $17.5 billion in 2015-16. We feel the conversation is about how to bring together business leaders and charity and non-profit sector leaders (especially those organisations who do great work but aren’t savvy fundseekers) to find shared goals and work as partners to make change happen.

We genuinely believe that meaningful participation at a project governance level leads to better project outcomes and promotes ownership of the project. Stakeholders who are involved in project governance groups have the opportunity to provide feedback on the overall approach for the project, ensure that...

Given the nature of their role, Primary Health Networks (PHNs) are constantly required to engage effectively with a diverse range of stakeholders. Engagement underpins health needs assessments, regional planning activities, service co-design and program reviews/evaluation to name just a few.

If you are an organisation seeking to demonstrate your impact, enhance service delivery and better position yourself for future investment, do not go past two critical pieces to the puzzle - monitoring and evaluation. Read a case example of what we did, what we found and what is next for one of our partner organisations.