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Author Archives: Kate Sloane

Living longer, living healthier? Latest Official Report on independent life expectancy in NZ

Monday, August 31st, 2015 | Kate Sloane | 1 Comment

Professor Tony Blakely and Professor Alistair Woodward

Independent Life Expectancy in NZIn this blog we review the latest update by the Ministry of Health on how much of NZers life expectancy can be expected to be in good health. The good news? We are both living longer, and living longer in good health. The bad news? According to this report, the percentage of our lives with some dependency due to poor health is increasing. And there are marked inequalities in healthy life expectancy. This sort of analysis, as hard as it is to get right, is important – as a society we do not want to just live longer, but live longer in good health. However, we have concerns about the accuracy of this Report, and critique it in this blog.

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What the Pacific & Mexico can tell us about soft drink taxes and public health

Tuesday, August 18th, 2015 | Kate Sloane | No Comments

Dr Andrea McDonald

Soft drinks blog picThere are many ways that taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) can be designed and implemented. These aspects can affect the likely impact on SSB consumption and health. This blog looks at a policy discussion document from the Pacific and explores some of the reasons SSB tax outcomes from Mexico appear to show positive reductions in SSB consumption.

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Modelling tobacco tax – implications of BODE3 paper just out, and personal reflections on the research journey

Friday, July 31st, 2015 | Kate Sloane | No Comments

Professor Tony Blakely

Tony BlakelyYesterday we published a paper in PLoS Medicine that estimates the health gains, health inequality and health system cost impacts of ongoing annual 10% increases in tobacco tax. In this blog I outline the key findings of this paper, and why I think this paper is important. I also reflect on my 8 year journey from laying the foundations for this paper to its actual publication, the realisation of a vision of epidemiology informing policy.

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Health-related food taxes and subsidies: A critique of opposition arguments

Monday, July 27th, 2015 | Kate Sloane | No Comments

Professor Cliona Ni Mhurchu, Associate Professor Nick Wilson, and Professor Tony Blakely

junkfood1Health-related food taxes and subsidies are a hot topic internationally. Emerging research suggests they could improve diets and produce substantial health gains. However, the proposition of food pricing policies often meets with vigorous opposition and a range of counter-arguments relating to potential harms, lack of efficacy, and incursion on personal freedoms. In this blog, we briefly analyse 8 common arguments raised in opposition to such policies, and consider their basis drawing on the best available NZ and international evidence.

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A new online calculator for estimating how much a society might spend on life-saving interventions

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2015 | Kate Sloane | No Comments

By the BODE3 Programme Team*

In this blog we describe an online calculator we developed to estimate the maximum investment society might consider spending on life-saving health interventions, while remaining cost-effective. For NZ, the amounts generated by this calculator vary greatly by age: NZ$ 1.2 million for an intervention to save the life of a child, NZ$ 0.7 million for a 50-year-old, and NZ$ 0.2 million for an 80-year-old, assuming we are willing to spend $45,000 per healthy life-years gained and the person is returned to the expected health status of the average NZ citizen. These results are very sensitive to the choice of discount rate and to the selected cost-effectiveness threshold. Policy-makers could use this calculator as a rapid screening tool to determine if more detailed cost-effectiveness analyses of potential life-saving interventions might be worthwhile.

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