Creative Resources as Inputs to the Health Sector

Harnessed alongside managerial and technical skills, creative and cultural resources are becoming essential components of modern production processes. As well as contributing to the competitiveness of Australian industry, these resources are playing an increasingly significant role in innovation and securing the community’s wellbeing. This project, the second in partnership with the Australia Council, builds on Educating for the Creative Workforce and the ongoing mapping agenda of the CCI to develop qualitative indicators of the increasingly widespread deployment of creative activities across the economy.

This project uses statistical analysis and up to 20 case studies to examine and illustrate the contribution of creative activities to the healthcare sector, focusing on examples of both external creative providers to this sector and creative activities embedded within it. The healthcare sector was selected because of its growing centrality in the Australian economy, its high labour content, knowledge intensity and information requirements, and its high (and rising) costs. Moreover, the combination of Australia’s ageing population, the impending decline in the proportion of people in the workforce, and demands for more and better quality healthcare, means that organisations are seeking to become more productive, developing new goods and services and new ways of delivering them. Other factors are also opening up new opportunities for the application of creative skills to the healthcare system: broadband, software, the use of digitised information, and consumer demand for more information about, and control over, their own health.

The case studies will illustrate the way traditional creative activities contribute to healthcare, and how synergies between new technologies and creative skills are modifying practice across the full spectrum of healthcare – from disease prevention to acute care, from city to isolated communities, and from individual service providers to large institutions.