IJE Advance Access originally published online on January 20, 2009
International Journal of Epidemiology 2009 38(2):477-479; doi:10.1093/ije/dyn369
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2009; all rights reserved.
Commentary: Closing the health gap for Indigenous Australians—will better counting mean better services and investment in the social production of health?
University of South Australia, School of Health Sciences, Adelaide, Australia. E-mail: robyn.mcdermott@unisa.edu.au
Accepted 16 December 2008
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
Australia enjoys one of the highest life expectancies and one of the best health care systems in the world. Yet the persistence of huge social, economic, educational and health gaps between the first Australians and the rest belies claims to inclusive social policy and universal access to health care. Where other OECD countries appear to have narrowed their Indigenous health gap over past decades, Australia seems uniquely unable to achieve this, and still reports a 17-year difference in life expectancy.1
The Burden of Disease (BoD) studies, first produced and then refined since the early 1990s, have developed an