The Director of the WHO Centre for Health Development (WHO Kobe Centre/WKC), Dr Sarah Louise Barber, presented international comparisons in health and aged care pricing and system resilience at the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority (IHACPA) 2025 conference in Adelaide, Australia on 5 August 2025.
The theme of the conference was on “Integrating resilience within the care economy” to stimulate collaboration and innovation around the challenges of rapid growth and the workforce to ensure the resilience and sustainability of the sector in the future.
For the first time at this annual conference, the disability sector joined policymakers, researchers, health and aged care industry providers and consumer groups to deliberate hospital residential aged care, home support and disability services pricing. Discussions included methodologies and frameworks for arriving at annual pricings and costings.
Following this event, on 11 August Dr Barber was invited as a distinguished scholar by IHACPA partner, the Leeder Centre at the University of Sydney, to deliver the 2025 Seng Tee Lee Lecture on health policy in the Asia Pacific region. This was the opening keynote for the Centre’s Emerging Health Policy Research Conference which showcases emerging health policy and health economics research from academics, practitioner researchers, health policy decision-makers and students.
The Leeder Centre is an Impact Centre in the Faculty of Medicine and Health specialising in health policy, health economics and data, and health services analysis, teaching and research for improving equity, effectiveness and efficiency of health systems in Australia and internationally.
WKC is a global research centre of excellence conducts research about innovations in service delivery models and sustainable financing to accelerate progress towards Universal Health Coverage in the context of population ageing.