Workshops

2-Day Workshop on Systems Thinking and Modelling for Health: Simple models for Complex System Dynamics

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO REGISTER OR ENQUIRE

Date:	November 27 – 28, 2008
Location:	AGSM Kensington Campus | Centre for Health Informatics | University of New South Wales | Sydney | Australia

The health care system is a complex collection of interactions. Navigating the health care system is an increasingly difficult and frustrating task. This is true for patients, carers, clinicians, policy makers, funders, politicians and citizens. A continual stream of new technologies and health conditions adds a dynamic dimension to this confusing world. These advances in biomedical knowledge and technologies have forced specialized clinicians and policy makers to focus on understanding and analyzing the parts of the system rather than taking an overall systems approach.

In all nations there are chronic persistent problems of cost control, safety and quality of care, equitable access to skilled health professionals and a search for better ways to organize and fund health services delivery. Tools and methods for understanding complexity and designing social systems are being developed and applied, particularly in the systems science and engineering disciplines. Their use in health care is increasing with the wider availability of powerful computer simulation tools and success stories in understanding systems biology and furthering the climate change debate. However uptake has been slow due to health professionals’ lack of familiarity with the concepts, technical language and tools required to tackle the dynamics of complex systems. One such tool is system dynamics modelling.

In this workshop we will use simple computer models to teach health professionals and researchers with minimum or no experience in modelling some of the key health system dynamics we have discovered while consulting and researching real world problems over the past two decades.

This will be a hands-on workshop using computer models to understand the concept of how structure determines behaviour by running virtual “what-if” experiments. These models will cover a wide range of problems across several disciplines, including health policy and planning, public health, epidemiology, clinical practice, hospital and emergency department management.

Application areas include patient flows, safety and quality, medicines use, illicit drug use, aged care dementia rehabilitation and intellectual disability, health informatics, diffusion of new technologies, physiology models, chronic disease management, infectious disease control, patient flows, clinical work, worker burnout and workforce, dynamic cost effectiveness analysis, health funding, social determinants of health and health system performance incentives.