3.9 Cost effectiveness
The Department is engaged in a long-term process of developing and reporting on cost-effectiveness throughout its operations. Although the most advanced approach to this work has been in the natural heritage side of the business, the main interventions delivered by the Department across its main output classes have been identified and linked with the intermediate outcomes that they support.
The next phase, currently under development in the main output classes, involves measuring the results obtained at the intermediate outcome level through delivery of the range of interventions. Initially this will only be concerned with the main or "vital few" interventions. As part of this phase a suite of indicators has been identified, but must now be reviewed and tested as a proof of concept prior to developing reports and piloting implementation.
In the natural heritage area, national level reporting on status and trend in these indicators is dependent on piloting and implementation of the optimised sampling strategy currently under contract with Land Care Research. This is required in the natural heritage area before the Department can move from a local focus, where the requisite data is collected, to delivery in a national context.
Two final phases are then envisaged in the main output classes - these will involve fully costing the most important interventions and developing cost-effectiveness ratios for these using the indicators. The cost-effectiveness ratios will then be available as a tool to guide selection of the most cost-effective interventions with respect to making gains in intermediate outcomes. This work has yet to begin in all output classes, although a conceptual model of how this works in natural heritage will be available during the year as a result of the species optimisation project.
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