health reforms that emphasize public health and improvements in primary care can be cost-effective measures to achieve health improvements, especially in developing countries that face severe resource constraints. in their paper “shanghai rising: health improvements as measured by avoidable mortality since 2000,” gusmano et al suggest that shanghai’s health policy-makers have been successful in...

BACKGROUND Healthcare reforms initiated in the early 2000s in Québec involved the implementation of new modes of primary healthcare (PHC) delivery and the creation of Health and Social Services Centers (HSSCs) to support it. The objective of this article is to assess and explain the degree of PHC organizational change achieved following these reforms. METHODS We conducted two surveys of PHC o...

The main aim of this study was to investigate trends in the organization and functioning of the HC service. The Croatian Health Service Yearbooks, from 1995 to 2012, served as the basis for the data. The results showed that the HC reforms aimed at the organization and functioning of primary care for women somehow compromised their accessibility. A general lack of around 100 gynecologists, the h...

In their article titled “Family Medicine: Preparing for a High-Performance Health Care System,” Karen Davis and Kristof Stremikis present an exciting and affirming vision for the future of primary care in this country. Thanks to the wide acceptance of the concept of themedical home among policymakers, health systems, and now some payers, primary care is finally on the map in a serious way. Alth...

Contractualization consists in the development and implementation of a documented agreement whereby one party (payer) provides compensation to the other party (provider) in exchange for a set of health services to a targeted population. We describe, through a case study, the history and the process of implementation of primary health care contractualization (since 1992) in Portugal, emphasizing...

Recognizing the advantages of primary care as a means of improving the entire health system, this text comments on reforms of publicly funded primary health centers, and the rapid development of private forprofit providers in Sweden. Many goals and expectations are connected to such reforms, which equally require critical analyses of scarce resources, professional trust/motivation and business ...