Ideally, health policies should be based on valid scientific evidence and such evidence requires health research. Health research is also an essential tool for achieving equity in health and development. Although the need to carry out health research is now well accepted, South Asian countries still lag behind and do not make any meaningful contributions to health research and development. This...

The paper by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, which follows directly, is one of a series of lectures sponsored by the Medical Student Council. The Lectureship, instituted early in 1974, was designed to bring outstanding teachers of medicine and leaders in public health to the Yale University School of Medicine. This program was organized entirely by medical students on behalf of the student body. The...

It was in November 1983, Prof. Wig and I, published an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry titled “A training approach to enhance the availability of mental health manpower in a developing country”(Srinivasa Murthy and Wig,1983). This article presented the case for involving the peripheral health workers in providing essential mental health care, as a way of addressing the problem of ...

Managing innovation The development of health services world wide has been piecemeal and uncoordinated. Some control has been exerted over health service resources by controlling capital and by manpower strategies, but these are relatively crude methods largely concerned with control of resources and not with quality of health care provided. The main determinant of the quality of health care is...

Israel, like many other European countries, has recently reformed its health care system. The regulated market created by the National Health Insurance (NHI) law embodies many of the principles of managed competition. The purpose of this paper is to present initial findings from an evaluation of the first 3 years of the reform (1995-1997) regarding the implementation of the reform and the exten...

More than 85% of the world's population lives in 153 low-income and middle-income countries (LAMICs). Although country-level information on mental health systems has recently become available, it still has substantial gaps and inconsistencies. Most of these countries allocate very scarce financial resources and have grossly inadequate manpower and infrastructure for mental health. Many LAMICs a...

THE IMMINENT EXPIRATION of the Health Professions Educational Assistance Act of 1976 (Public Law 94484) has refocused discussion among Federal officials upon the direction that health manpower policy should now take. As affected parties, State Governments and health professions schools are assessing their priorities and formulating positions on the issues that will be debated. Although items fo...

Many western industrialized countries are currently suffering from a crisis in health human resources, one that involves a debate over the recruitment and licensing of foreign-trained doctors and nurses. The intense public policy interest in foreign-trained medical personnel, however, is not new. During the 1960s, western countries revised their immigration policies to focus on highly-trained p...

Manpower projections for oral health are generally held to be more accurate than those for other health sectors since the diseases involved and their treatment times can be predicted more precisely. Nevertheless most oral health manpower projections are either overestimates or are not in line with the resources of individual countries, especially in developing countries. Zimbabwe was taken as t...

An editorial in the BMJ that appeared shortly after thepoblica-tion of the Acheson report on p0mary health care in irnner London began swih the assertion, "Britain's inner cities have some of the worst social and medical probloms combined sith some of the poorest primary care services. This has been known for a long time ...."'1 The results of a survey among genralprctitioners in five healthd a...