The Latest Breaking News from Yuting Zhang

A serious illness or injury to a family member is more than a medical crisis. It’s a health shock that triggers a ripple effect, forcing families to make difficult trade-offs with their time and money.

Australia needs to do better at preventing health conditions from arising and worsening, according to an interim report on delivering quality care more efficiently released overnight by the Productivity Commission.

Toowong Private Hospital in Brisbane is the latest hospital to succumb to financial pressures and will close its doors next week. The industry association attributes the psychiatric hospital’s closure to insufficient payments from and delayed funding negotiations with private insurers.

Seeing a medical specialist can leave you with significant out-of-pocket costs. Yet political parties have not adequately addressed this in their pre-election bids.

Anyone who needs to make their first appointment with a psychiatrist may expect a bit of a wait. Our new research shows Australians are waiting an average 77 days for this initial appointment. But some were waiting for at least eight months.

Unaffordable GP visits has become a pressing issue amid the increasing cost-of-living crisis. About 30% of Australians delayed or didn’t see a GP in 2023–24.

Australia’s second-largest private health insurer, Bupa, has recently started offering its members three free GP telehealth consultations a year. This follows other insurers such as nib offering its members digital GP consults, for things like prescriptions and medical certificates, for a fee.

A majority of Australians voted “no” to an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. But if we dig deeper into the data from the 2023 referendum, there is more to learn, especially about the health of Indigenous Australians living in communities with strong opposition to the Voice.

Community-level opposition to marriage equality and the stress that came with it is still making some Australians in same-sex relationships sick years after the vote, our study suggests.