ABSTRACT
Health is an industry that is significantly dependent upon, and intertwined with, the related industries of research, education, pharmaceuticals and health insurance. Australian health statistics generally distinguish between private and public hospitals. As governments became increasingly determined to limit the growth of health expenditure and relocate hospital beds from within the nineteenth-century boundaries of Australia’s capital cities towards their late twentieth-century outskirts, their bureaucrats inevitably clashed with the nonprofit public hospitals. Ambulance services are another field where a nonprofit association, the St John Ambulance Association, pioneered the provision of a valuable service. Third sector organisations provide a number of other specialised services in the health industry. Community health centres are invariably run by the government, though in some states they are structured to make them appear as if they are independent of government and under ‘community’ control. Emergency service workers are trained volunteers but are under the direct control of employees of government emergency service departments.
