Centre of Research Excellence - Disability and Health

The Centre of Research Excellence in Disability and Health (CRE-DH) aims to identify cost-effective policies that improve the health of people with disabilities in Australia.

The CRE-DH aims to guide social and health policy reform for people with disabilities in Australia.

Research clearly shows that on traditional indicators of health, Australians with disabilities fare particularly badly in global terms – they have the lowest relative income and one of the lowest levels of labour force participation of all the OECD countries. Solving the problem of disadvantage and the consequent poor health of people with disabilities requires a robust knowledge base to inform policy reform.

We bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers with stakeholders (from disability advocacy and health economics to policy analysis and public health), we will identify the key issues affecting Australians with disabilities. Based on these ongoing consultations we will document how these vary between people with and without disabilities over time, across different geographical areas and between subgroups of the population. We plan to map the spatial distribution of socio-economic and health inequalities between people with and without disabilities; apply cutting-edge epidemiological methods to establish the main social determinants of health of people with disability; build the first ever cost-effectiveness model to estimate the health impacts and cost benefits of policy interventions for people with disabilities, and embed stakeholders in the research process so that they are involved in the co-production of knowledge.

Reducing these inequalitites requires strong evidence so that Australians with disability will benefit from policy reform, and are not further disadvantaged in their lifetime.

Official website

www.credh.org.au

Funding

The Centre of Research Excellence in Disability and Health is funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Partners