From Crisis to Complexity: A new governance framework for health and wellbeing in Australia

Governments, state, federal and local, are responding to multiple concomitant health crises requiring sophisticated short-, medium-and long-term objectives and strategies to mitigate. Traditional models of healthcare, healthcare economics, and broader social theories are often incompatible or incomplete in respect of making sense of why and how health crises are evolving. This paper aims to introduce a more rigorous complexity-informed approach to understanding the origins of, and solutions to these challenges. This paper is organised into four sections which set out the substantial logic, arguments and case studies supporting a new paradigm for healthcare economics, quality, and productivity: Complexity. Content is drawn from a wide range of disciplines, grappling with the essentially complex nature of the relevant field of research. Making sense of the varied sources of data requires a logical scaffolding upon which to link the evidence together. Achieving this rests on recognising three essential epistemologies which must be aligned and integrated: complexity, entropy, and ethics.