The Atlantic Healthcare Collaboration for Innovation and Improvement in Chronic Disease (AHC) Quality Improvement Collaborative (QIC) in Eastern Canada provided an approach to spur system-level reform across multiple health systems for patients and families living with chronic disease. Developed and led by senior executives with a unique governance approach and involving clinical front-line tea...

Using HIV/AIDS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and avian influenza as case studies, this paper discusses the processes and dilemmas of China's participation in health governance, both at the domestic level and the global level. Globalization has eroded the boundary between public and private health and between domestic and global health governance. In addition, the SARS outbreak of 2...

Medical toxicology is somehow a neglected field of medicine. Support for this discipline is necessary as there are many competing interests within a nation's public health priorities (1). In the previous issue of the Asia Pacific Journal of Medical Toxicology, the essentials of the empowerment of medical toxicology in the Asia Pacific region have been discussed (2). Perhaps, there is now an urg...

A central problem in designing effective models of provider governance in health systems has been to ensure an appropriate balance between the concerns of public sector and/or government decision-makers, on the one hand, and of non-governmental health services actors in civil society and private life, on the other. In tax-funded European health systems up to the 1980s, the state and other publi...

Today's global health crisis illustrates many of the transnational governance challenges the United States faces today. In the arena of global health, the United States can create a new role for itself by moving beyond a national-interest paradigm and strengthening its "soft power" position in health. Health in recent administrations has moved beyond being "just" a humanitarian issue to being o...

CONTEXT The rapid emergence of new technologies support collection and use of a wide variety of data from clinical, genomic, social and behavioral, environmental, and financial sources, and have a great impact on the governance of personal health information. PAPERS IN THE SPECIAL ISSUE The papers in this special issue on governance touch on the topic from a variety of focuses, including lead...

The UK government has set a challenging agenda for monitoring and improving the quality of health care. It is based on a series of national standards and guidelines, a strategy for quality improvement termed “clinical governance,” and a framework for monitoring the quality of care in and performance of NHS organisations (box). Clinical governance is “a framework through which NHS organisations ...

Governance in health is cited as one of the key factors in balancing the concerns of the government and public sector with the interests of civil society/private players, but often remains poorly described and operationalized. Richard Saltman and Antonio Duran look at two aspects in the search for new provider models in a context of health markets signalling liberalisation: (i) the role of the ...

Health systems research aims to understand the governance of health systems (i.e. how health systems function and perform and how their actors interact with each other). This can be achieved by applying innovative methodologies and concepts that are going to capture the complexity and dynamics of health systems when they are affected by shocks. The capacity of health systems to adapt to shocks ...