SAVE

lives and cost

While the pre-COVID prevention funding system had been extremely successful in the past 20 years in reducing communicative disease deaths globally, it has not been able to reduce non-communicative disease (NCD) and injury mortality.

There are many effective programs which can save lives and costs from these burdens – such as programs preventing pre-diabetic progression to diabetes, stroke, avoidable blindness, mental disorders and neonatal diseases.

For examples of proven public policy interventions see research such as Assessing Cost Effectiveness in Prevention, which shows how to prevent NCD burden while saving costs. In that publication, the dominant interventions would save a net $6.4 billion in responsive healthcare costs.

An example of a savings program is Resolve.

Resolve is a recovery-orientated community support program which combines a residential service for periodic crisis care integrated psychosocial, medical and mental health support; and a help line for after-hours support from peers.

The program is delivered by Flourish Australia, a highly experienced mental health service provider.

The program is expected to generate significant savings for the NSW Government through a reduction in participants’ utilisation of health and other services, in particular by reducing the number of days spent in hospital. These savings, when achieved, will be reinvested to enable the continued delivery of the Resolve program.