Dear health minister: tend the garden but make sure you fence the crocodiles.

This paper offers lessons to in-coming health ministers on how they can act to reduce inequities and take action on social determinants. It draws on an interview study of twenty former Australian State, Territory and Federal health ministers about the extent to which they were able to do these things during their tenure. In order to take effective health equity action the health ministers advised: ensure evidence is used to develop a strong party policy platform for health equity; install policy entrepreneurs for health equity and social determinants in the health ministry; build popular constituencies through processes of deliberative democracy; establish context appropriate cross-department mechanisms to co-ordinate action on social determinants; and be elected in the context of a political party which values social justice and redistribution.

Childbirth traditions and cultural perceptions of safety in Nepal: critical spaces to ensure the survival of mothers and newborns in remote mountain villages.

Objective: to uncover local beliefs regarding pregnancy and birth in remote mountainous villages of Nepal in order to understand the factors which impact on women's experiences of pregnancy and childbirth and the related interplay of tradition, spiritual beliefs, risk and safety which impact on those experiences.

Design: this study used a qualitative methodological approach with in-depth interviews framework within social constructionist and feminist critical theories.

Setting: the setting comprised two remote Nepalese mountain villages where women have high rates of illiteracy, poverty, disadvantage, maternal and newborn mortality, and low life expectancy.

The health care system as a social determinant of health: qualitative insights from South Australian maternity consumers.

Health systems and policies are important determinants of health because they influence the type and quality of health care available to a population. This study included semi-structured qualitative interviews and a questionnaire to collect demographic data and household details for a purposeful sample of 38 mothers and 24 fathers from four socioeconomic areas of metropolitan South Australia who had at least one child aged between 1 and 6 years of age. The participants reported that birth experiences within the predominantly medicalised maternity system were at odds with the expectations of a significant proportion of contemporary consumers that maternity care will leave them not only with a healthy mother and baby, but also with no undue adverse impacts on their physical, mental and relationship health.

Why planned attended homebirth should be more widely supported in Australia.

This article argues that the continuing reluctance on the part of professional and bureaucratic bodies in Australia to provide for and support planned attended homebirth for low-risk women is unfounded according to the research evidence. It also suggests that such lack of support might be encouraging some planned but intentionally unattended homebirths to occur in Australia, particularly as in recent years there appears to have been an increase in popularity in freebirth (or do-it-yourself homebirth). The article calls for RANZCOG and Australian state health departments to support planned attended homebirth for low-risk women in the face of what is now a considerable amount of evidence showing its safety, when compared with unplanned homebirth and hospital birth.