Health Policy and Systems Science

WECARE is a two-year project funded by the Health Comes First (HCF) Research Foundation. The project addresses Australia’s hospital workforce challenges by examining how work is distributed across General Medicine ward teams at two Victorian sites—Western Health (Sunshine Hospital) and Bendigo Health.

Using computational simulation, the WECARE project will model and test alternative workforce configurations before changes are implemented in practice. The project will explore options including task reallocation or redistribution, decommissioning of low-value activities, and technology-enabled support to identify workforce models that improve both staff experience and patient care.

Project Team: Professor Harriet Hiscock (Principal Investigator; Department of Paediatrics), Dr Fjalar de Haan (Deputy Lead; Department of Psychiatry), Dr Cameron Zachreson (computational modelling; Department of Psychiatry), and Sonia Khano (Project Manager; Department of Paediatrics).

In partnership with the Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing, this project applies systems science and computational modelling to understand and improve the design and delivery of mental health services in Victoria.

The project is developing two complementary simulation models:

• A system dynamics model representing the Victorian mental health system at a service level, capturing current patterns of service use, referral pathways, capacity constraints, and system interactions. This model is being developed in partnership with service providers, consumers, and carers.
• A suite of agent-based models representing individual consumer journeys through specific mental health pathways, capturing differences in needs, experiences, access, and outcomes.

Together, these models will allow stakeholders to explore how changes to service design and delivery may influence both system performance and consumer experiences. The project aligns with international health system performance frameworks to benchmark performance, identify effective practices, and highlight opportunities for improvement.

Project team: Associate Professor Katrina Witt (Principal Investigator), Professor Jason Thompson, and Ms Branislava Godic.

Australia’s disability and injury insurance schemes—including the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), Transport Accident Commission (TAC), and WorkSafe—face significant challenges, including rising costs, financial pressures, and concerns about long-term sustainability and participant outcomes.

This project, funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship, aims to address these challenges by applying computational social science approaches to develop a modular, open-source agent-based modelling framework. Through co-designed simulations with stakeholders, the project will create a “virtual laboratory” to explore how scheme design influences outcomes, test policy options, identify emerging risks, and support evidence-informed decision-making.

Project team: Professor Jason Thompson (Principal Investigator).

Each year, approximately 500,000 Australian workers experience workplace injuries. Many face not only physical and psychological impacts but also the challenges of navigating complex and sometimes adversarial compensation systems.

The Workers’ Voice project aims to reimagine workers’ compensation in Australia by placing the experiences and perspectives of injured workers at the centre of system redesign. The project uses computational modelling approaches—including system dynamics and agent-based modelling—to represent interactions between injured workers, service providers, insurers, and other system participants.

By incorporating lived experience and stakeholder perspectives into model development, the project will explore how structural and policy changes could create compensation systems that better support recovery, wellbeing, and resilience.

The modelling approach developed through this project also provides a framework that can be applied to other complex health and social systems.

Project team: Professor Jason Thompson (Principal Investigator) and Ms Branislava Godic.

The National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) has partnered with the University of Melbourne and the Centre for Disability Studies to develop and implement a new approach to assessing the support needs of participants in the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

Over five years, the project team will work with the disability community and the NDIA to refine and adapt the Instrument for the Classification and Assessment of Support Needs (I-CAN) Version 6 as the foundation for this new assessment approach.

The I-CAN is an evidence-based, holistic, strengths-based, and person-centred assessment tool designed for adults with disability. Developed and validated in Australia, it has been successfully used across Australian disability contexts.

This initiative will research and co-design a new approach to gathering information about the supports adults with disability need, ensuring the assessment process reflects participant experiences and delivers meaningful, person-centred outcomes

This project applies systems thinking and dynamic modelling approaches to address the ongoing challenge of road traffic fatalities in Australia.

The project aims to develop new insights into road safety by formally modelling safety science concepts and exploring how interactions between system components contribute to crash risk. The resulting model will provide a platform for experimentation, enabling researchers and policymakers to test interventions and better understand how current and future transport systems may influence safety outcomes.

The project will support evidence-informed policy development by identifying opportunities for earlier intervention and prevention of future risks.

Project team: Professor Gemma Read (Principal Investigator, University of the Sunshine Coast), Professor Jason Thompson, and Professor Rod McClure.

This research program develops computational and mathematical approaches to understanding social identity—how people define themselves as members of groups, and how group identities influence behaviour, relationships, leadership, and collective action.

The work combines social psychology theory with computational methods, including agent-based modelling of identity dynamics on social networks, mathematical frameworks for representing individual and group identities, and analysis of how networks of identification change over time.

This interdisciplinary research is conducted in collaboration with Professor Alex Haslam’s group at the University of Queensland. The collaboration has included a research workshop hosted at UQ in February 2024, with early findings presented at the Social Simulation Conference in Kraków (2024; proceedings published 2025). Further theoretical developments are currently underway.

HPSS representatives: Dr Fjalar de Haan and Professor Jason Thompson.