Adaptive decision-making: how Australian healthcare managers decide.

Despite many calls for the utilisation of research evidence in health policy-making, it is not widely practised, and little is known about how decision-makers in healthcare organisations actually make decisions. We recruited a purposive sample of Australian healthcare decision-makers to complete a web-based survey. We then took a sub-sample from willing respondents for individual interviews.

Resource allocation and economic evaluation in Australia's healthcare system.

Objective: To explore dimensions and varieties of economic evaluations that healthcare decision-makers do or do not use.

Design: Web-based survey.

Setting And Participants: A purposive sample of Australian healthcare decision-makers was recruited by direct invitation through email.

Schools as social complex adaptive systems: a new way to understand the challenges of introducing the health promoting schools concept.

Achieving system-wide implementation of health promotion programs in schools and sustaining both the program and its health related benefits have proved challenging. This paper reports on a qualitative study examining the implementation of health promoting schools programs in primary schools in Sydney, Australia. It draw upon insights from systems science to examine the relevance and usefulness of the concept of "complex adaptive systems" as a framework to better understand ways in which health promoting school interventions could be introduced and sustained.

Factors associated with participation in resident action groups in metropolitan Sydney: a cross-sectional survey.

Objective: To explore the characteristics of participants in resident action groups in metropolitan Sydney.

Methods: A stratified random sample of participants in 50 groups registered with local councils were surveyed in 1997. Demographic, social/psychological, cost/benefit, group process and group potency variables and four measures of amount of participation were examined.

Mental health status of Iranian migrants in Sydney.

Objective: The aim of this study was to determine the levels and predictors of psychological distress within the Iranian community in Sydney, Australia.

Method: Participants (n = 161) were identified using snowball sampling, and a questionnaire incorporating the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-20) and other migration-related factors was mailed to their preferred address.

Results: A relatively high proportion of respondents (37%) had GHQ-20 scores above the recommended threshold (4+).