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Background
In 2024, the Australian Government asked the Productivity Commission to identify the highest priority reform areas under five pillars of productivity, with the goal of delivering practical and implementable policy ideas across the five pillars by the end of 2025.
This submission responds to the Productivity Commission’s Interim Report on Pillar 4: Delivering quality care more efficiently. Australia’s care economy is undergoing significant transformation, marked by a broader range of service options, innovative care delivery models, and evolving consumer expectations. As demand intensifies and costs rise across key sectors — including health, aged care, disability services, and early childhood education — the government is seeking strategies to enhance care quality while alleviating pressure on public budgets and the workforce.
The Interim Report articulates three key policy reform areas for further exploration:
• Reform of quality and safety regulation to support a more cohesive care economy, with an emphasis on getting these regulatory settings right
• Embed collaborative commissioning to increase the integration of care services, address service gaps, and better tailor care services to local needs
• Development of a National Prevention Investment Framework that recognises the cross-sectoral value of preventive initiatives and explicitly accounts for the time needed for their long-term social and economic benefits to emerge.
As Australia’s largest non-government network of health, community, and aged care services, Catholic Health Australia (CHA) and its members play a leading role in the care economy. With deep experience across the sector, CHA is well positioned to meaningfully contribute to the current policy reform agenda. This submission reinforces the case for a cohesive, system-wide response that delivers care more efficiently and, most importantly, returns more time to care.
