The Committee recommends that the Minister for Health and Ageing commission economic modelling in order to establish the cost implications of obesity to Australia and the cost-benefits of various interventions.
Agreed in part.
The Australian Government recognises that there are challenges to producing accurate estimates of the costs of obesity and the cost-benefits of interventions, as noted in the Weighing it up report. One of the input requirements for high quality modelling is population data on the current prevalence of obesity and related chronic diseases. Information from the 2011-13 Australian Health Survey provides up-to-date cross-sectional prevalence data upon which future modelling work can be based.
The ACE-Prevention report (Assessing Cost-Effectiveness in Prevention), a recent study of the cost-effectiveness of 150 health interventions, was released on 8 September 2010. This work, which was conducted by researchers from the University of Queensland and Deakin University, was funded by a National Health and Medical Research Council grant. The ACE-Prevention project aimed to provide a comprehensive analysis of the cost-effectiveness of 123 preventive intervention options, compared with 27 treatment interventions, addressing the non-communicable disease burden in Australia. The project found that a large impact on population health can be achieved by a limited number of cost-effective interventions, while a greater number of cost-effective interventions (such as physical activity promotion involving pedometers or mass media) can have more moderate, but still significant impacts on population health.
The Australian Government also recognises the importance of collecting high quality data on its own initiatives targeting obesity and related non-communicable diseases. The National Partnership Agreement on Preventive Health includes performance indicators to track the achievements of the Agreement against its objectives; evaluations of the key activities funded by the Agreement; and a comprehensive evaluation of the Agreement’s outcomes. The body of data that will be generated by these activities will also support cost-benefit analyses of specific interventions funded by the Agreement.