You are here:

Striving for fairer healthcare

PhD candidate Karinna Saxby.

PhD candidate Karinna Saxby's ground-breaking research exposing systemic injustice in Indigenous communities and people with disability is creating a path to a more equitable and inclusive healthcare system.

Ms Saxby is driven by a deep conviction that access to quality healthcare is a fundamental right.

Through her work, she strives to dismantle systemic injustices and create a future where equitable access to essential care is a reality for all, regardless of background or circumstance. “I’ve always had a strong sense of social justice and felt that population health inequalities are deeply unfair,” Ms Saxby says.

As a PhD candidate at Monash Business School’s Centre for Health Economics, her research unravelled the intricate web of patient and place-based factors influencing healthcare use among disadvantaged groups in Australia.

“Each of my different research papers has different inspirations, but broadly I think that policies to improve healthcare use among disadvantaged populations is a key mechanism through which the government can improve health outcomes,” she says.

Her 2021 examination of sexual orientation disparities in healthcare use found that as structural stigma increases, Australians in same-sex relationships use more scripts for mental health disorders, are less likely to visit the doctor and more likely to report having a disability than their heterosexual peers.

“My work on stigma and healthcare use among the LGBTIQ community was inspired by the Marriage Equality plebiscite and in particular how I saw the toxic discussions were affecting my LGBTIQ friends,” she says.

Earlier this year, Ms Saxby published a paper demonstrating how affirmative action can reduce disparities in healthcare use by Indigenous peoples.

In her final paper, she discovered people with disabilities in areas with limited mental healthcare supply used crucial services less. Her research revealed these regional variations were the result of supply shortages, not patient demand or need, and led to increased self-harm hospitalisations, mental health-related emergency department visits and suicides.

“My work on Indigenous peoples and people with disability was largely motivated by the fact that these groups experience staggering disparities in life expectancy,” she says.

PhD supervisor Professor Dennis Petrie says Ms Saxby’s research highlights the complex ways in which policies and structures create unequal access and use of healthcare.

“If we are going to create a health system that works for everybody we need to understand where barriers currently exist and evaluate the effectiveness of policies targeted at closing these gaps,” Prof Petrie says.

“Karinna's research does this and provides data and evidence to communities and policymakers so that they can advocate for change.”

Now a research fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research based at the University of Melbourne, Ms Saxby is keen to continue her work to advocate for a fairer healthcare system.

“Historically disadvantaged groups in Australia experience persistent health inequalities that are deeply unfair, and there’s a substantial gap in the literature, so it’s crucial we generate an evidence case,” she says.