Toni Ashton

Toni Ashton is a New Zealand health economist, and was a full professor at the University of Auckland, specialising in the funding and structure of health systems.

Academic career
Ashton completed a PhD titled Quasi-Markets and Contracting for Health Services at the University of Auckland. Ashton then joined the faculty of the School of Population Health of the University of Auckland at Tāmaki, rising to full professor in 2012. Ashton has been part of the Child Poverty Action Group.

Ashton's research focuses on how health reforms, and how health services are organised and funded. In 2013, she co-led a collaboration between New Zealand and Canada to investigate models of community care for complex health needs in older adults. The Canadian side of the five-year research project was led by Dr Walter Wodchis at the University of Toronto.

In 2019, with Felicity Goodyear-Smith, Ashton published a critique of New Zealand's health system. Ashton and Goodyear-Smith's 2019 study identified seven areas of weakness in the system, including division between primary care and hospitals, inequity between treatments for injury versus disease, lack of funding, and workforce issues, and described how these weaknesses worsened inequitable access to healthcare. Ashton has also researched the cost of a healthy retirement in New Zealand.

In 2010 Ashton, then an associate professor, was awarded a University of Auckland Sustained Excellence in Teaching award.