ABSTRACT
This chapter examines health indicators that are often used as a means of allocating resources. These will become increasingly important, given government’s focus on program and service output measures in current Australian health system reforms. It is crucial that performance indicators accurately reflect the diversity of people's health experiences and health outcomes, rather than merely measuring levels of disease and infirmity. The chapter exposes the problems of a conventional focus on mortality and morbidity as indicators of health status and health intervention outcomes, and argues that to cater for diversity indicators must be broader, to include social indicators and subjective measures of quality of life. In a sense, social indicators tell us something about possible quality of life experiences, they refer to some of the preconditions for achieving quality of life, but they do not tell us whether such quality is actually experienced or not.
