Health care reforms in the 1990s promoted government collaboration with the private sector. This was in response to deficiencies in public sector provision, and in the light of the perceived private sector strengths of quality and efficiency. A diverse set of interactions evolved between the public and private sectors across the developing world. This was on the basis of very little information...

Round Table Round Table Discussion weak and its use, particularly in policy-making, is infrequent. Several efforts undertaken to strengthen health information have not taken into account any general framework for designing the information system. The paper by Shaw describes efforts to correct the multi-plicity of data sets in South Africa, especially at the periphery, without describing an over...

India's economic reforms began in 1991 when a newly elected Congress government, facing an exceptionally severe balance-of-payments crisis, embarked on a programme of shortterm stabilization combined with a longer-term programme of comprehensive structural reforms. Rethinking on economic policy had begun earlier in the mid-1980s by which time the limitations of a development strategy based on i...

Public sector reforms aimed at making the public sector efficient in provision of goods and services has been around since the world financial crises of the 1980s that resulted from the unprecedented surge in oil prices and the collapse of centrally planned economic systems of the eastern bloc. These reforms have been characterized by adoption of prudent management of resources through introduc...

In the recent past the impact of structural adjustment in the Indian health care sector has been felt in the reduction in central grants to States for public health and disease control programmes. This falling share of central grants has had a more pronounced impact on the poorer states, which have found it more difficult to raise local resources to compensate for this loss of revenue. With the...

Factors influencing cross-national diffusion of mental health policy are important to understand but complex to research. This commentary discusses Shen’s research study on cross-national diffusion of mental health policy; examines the extent to which the three questions researched by Shen (whether countries are more likely to have a mental health policy (a) the earlier a country becomes a memb...

1. Since the mid-1990s, Uzbekistan has undergone reforms in the health sector focused on restructuring of primary health care in Uzbekistan as well as the establishment of an emergency medical care network. These were defined in the August 1996 Law on Health Protection and the1998 presidential decree outlining a new structural framework for the Uzbek health care system and priority areas for he...

This paper uses a difference-in-difference style estimation strategy to test separately the impact of competition from public sector and private sector hospitals on the efficiency of public hospitals. Our identification strategy takes advantage of the phased introduction of a recent set of substantive reforms introduced in the English NHS from 2006 onwards. These reforms forced public sector he...

Surveys of patient satisfaction are widely used for identifying priorities and problems in healthcare reforms. The present study examined satisfaction and confidence of patients in public healthcare in Trinidad and Tobago. Data were gathered by interviewing a random sample (n = 280) of primary healthcare (PHC) patients. Level of patient satisfaction was high but not constant. Results of intervi...