If there is a bridge from research to practice, I’ve been crossing against the traffic. In 2000, I moved from the increasingly tough world of health care management practice (thinking I’d done my share and it was someone else’s turn) and took up teaching and research (hoping I’d have time to reflect on and learn more about the intractable problems I’d been battling). Unfortunately I failed to consider, even though I “knew”, that universities are also operating in an increasingly tough world, and academic work has also been intensified.

But my crossing did coincide with an emerging focus on health services research, which “examines how a variety of factors — from financing systems to medical technologies to personal behaviors — affect health care costs, quality, and access”.1 It is a broad field, spanning research on the macro policy settings (how to fund health care, who gets access) through to the micro level of health care practice (for example, how clinicians might work with patients who have chronic conditions as partners in the management of their care).

©Aust Health Rev 2006 www.aushealthreview.com.au PRINT ISSN: 0156-5788 ONLINE ISSN: 1449-8944