Background Although there is a general agreement on the benefits of evidence informed health policy development given resource constraints especially in Low-Income Countries (LICs), the definition of what evidence is, and what evidence is suitable to guide decision-making is still unclear. Our study is contributing to filling this knowledge gap. We aimed to explore health policy actors’ views r...

This commentary reflects on the contribution of this editorial and its “Three Challenges That Global Health Networks Face” to the totality of the framework developed over the past decade by Shiffman and his collaborators. It reviews the earlier works to demonstrate that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts in providing a package of tools for analysis of network effectiveness.   Additi...

The Distribution View provides a model that integrates four 6 distributional concerns in the evaluation of risky prospects. Starting from 7 these concerns, we can generate an ordering over a set of risky prospects, 8 or, starting from an ordering, we can extract a characterization of the 9 underlying distributional concerns. Separability of States and/or Persons 10 for multiple-person risky pro...

Each chapter ends with an attempt to draw conclusions on trends or developments. Interestingly, the question of trends and convergence of health policies (the authors deny that convergence actually has been shown to occur) is a recurrent theme in the book. However, when discussing the drivers of policy convergence, more attention to the effects of EU regulation and policy on member states’ heal...

In Europe, successful health policies have contributed to a continued decline in mortality. However, not all parts of Europe have benefited equally and the sustainability of achievements cannot be taken for granted since health policies vary widely even among neighbouring countries. Furthermore, there are a number of remaining public health challenges such as food and alcohol polices. We argue ...

78 BMJ | 10 JANUARY 2009 | VolUMe 338 Devolution and spending will probably be the two main health legacies of Tony Blair’s Labour government. Spending, because the historically low cost NHS received one of the greatest bursts of funding in history, with long term consequences for workforce, infrastructure, and patients; and devolution, because it created four distinct health systems just as th...

To the Editor: In the report on the spread of obesity in a social network, by Christakis and Fow­ ler, and the accompanying editorial by Barabási (July 26 issue),1,2 variables of social and economic status (SES) are not mentioned. Social networks conceal a high degree of social homogeneity — that is, people are more likely to network with people at similar income and educational levels — and we...