Assessing the Cost-Effectiveness of Child Maltreatment Preventive Interventions in Australia

The present thesis provides a comprehensive and policy-relevant assessment of the health and economic impacts of child maltreatment (CM) in Australia, alongside a rigorous economic model for evaluating the value-for-money of CM preventive interventions. Through four interrelated studies, the thesis systematically addresses critical gaps in the current literature by synthesizing global cost-effectiveness evidence on CM prevention, generating robust Australian estimates of the economic and health-related quality of life burden of CM using individual level data, and demonstrating how these empirical insights can be incorporated into a lifetime model-based economic evaluation framework.