Medicare is a popular program in Canada that offers universal access to medically-necessary healthcare services for all Canadians through a public insurance plan in each province. In spite of its popularity, healthcare privatization has been debated, often over concerns about wait times for healthcare services. A case report focused on the 2005 Supreme Court's response to the "Chaoulli v. Quebe...

China has been alarmed by its rapid rise in health care expenditures of social health insurance schemes. The health care expenditure per person for the 155 million people covered by the Chinese social insurance plans has been rising at an accelerative rate. We analyze why health care cost in China has risen, and show how other nations may benefit from this experience. The annual rate of increas...

BACKGROUND Uganda has hosted an estimated 200,000 refugees in post-emergency phase settlements interspersed within host communities since 1990. However, refugee health service runs parallel to host in most refugee-affected districts. The process of integration of health services began in 1999. OBJECTIVE To estimate and compare the costs and coverage of reproductive health (RH) interventions i...

BACKGROUND By 2030, the tobacco epidemic will be responsible for over eight million deaths worldwide per year, with 80% of those deaths occurring in low-resource countries. Despite the magnitude of the problem, little is known about the funding for global tobacco control. METHODS To estimate the amount of tobacco control funding, we created an integrated database based on information provided...

Swedish public health policy clearly illustrates how the concept of the Ottawa Charter for health promotion can be utilized at a national level. The impact has been more implicit than explicit. Public health has a long history in Sweden and much of the present and future is, and will be, linked to traditional values and structures. International input, however, has been essential to prompt new ...

The birth of the Bulletin The year 1990 was a landmark for public health in New South Wales (NSW). The Public Health Division at the then NSWDepartment of Health was in its infancy, having been formed at the end of 1989, and funding for a program to enhance public health in NSW led to the establishment of a network of Public Health Units and the NSW Public HealthOfficer Training Program. TheNSW...

Since 9/11, federal funds directed toward public health departments for training in disaster preparedness have dramatically increased, resulting in changing expectations of public health workers' roles in emergency response. This article explores the public health emergency responder role through data collected as part of an oral history conducted with the 3 health departments that responded to...

Worldwide, countries face the challenge of securing funds for health promotion. To address this issue, some governments have established health promotion foundations, which are statutory bodies with long-term and recurrent public resources. This article draws on experiences from Austria, Australia, Germany, Hungary and Switzerland to illustrate four lessons learned from the foundation model to ...

Nationally, environmental public health programs have been struggling to find ways to measure their capacity to carry out the 10 essential public health services. The ability to make this kind of measurement is crucial to showing the benefits of local, state, and federal funding of environmental public health programs, It is also crucial to the continuation of this funding. One local health dep...

Compared with other age groups, the elderly have less access to oral health care services and poorer oral health status. Most provinces have no publicly funded programs to address these inequities and the volunteer efforts of professionals and hospital-based programs have had little effect. In Ontario, two expert committees have called for seniors' programs augmented by a strong outreach compon...