Background Informal payments for health care, which are common in many countries, can have negative effects on health care access, equity and health status as they lead people to forgo or delay seeking care, or to sell assets to pay for care. Many countries are putting reforms in place with the aim of reducing informal payments. In order to be successful, such policies should be informed by the...

Origin of this Collection Over the past four years the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (MOHLTC) has been engaged in transforming the province’s health system, a process that includes decentralizing decisions pertaining to the delivery of services. This decentralization is occurring through the devolution of decisionmaking to the newly created Local Health Integration Networks (LHI...

For more than a hundred years, the United States has operated a decentralized vital statistics system as an essential component of public health. Statistics based on births and deaths registered in the United States are a primary source of data used to track health status, to plan, implement, and evaluate health and social services, and to set health policy. The national vital statistics system...

Global trends influence strategies for health-care delivery in low- and middle-income countries. A drive towards uniformity in the design and delivery of healthcare interventions, rather than solid local adaptations, has come to dominate global health policies. This study is a participatory longitudinal study of how one country in West Africa, The Gambia, has responded to global health policy t...

mohammed, north, and ashton find that decentralization in fiji shifted health-sector workloads from tertiary hospitals to peripheral health centres, but with little transfer of administrative authority from the centre. decisionmaking in five functional areas analysed remains highly centralized. they surmise that the benefits of decentralization in terms of services and outcomes will be limited....

In 2014, a series of reforms, called as the Health Sector Evolution Plan (HSEP), was launched in the health system of Iran in a stepwise process. HSEP was mainly based on the fifth 5-year health development national strategies (2011-2016). It included different interventions to: increase population coverage of basic health insurance, increase quality of care in the Ministry of Health and Medica...

pharmacists are healthcare professionals who practice in pharmacy, the field of health sciences focusing on safe and effective medication use. the role of pharmacist has shifted from the classical “lick, stick and pour” dispensary role, to being an integrated member of the health care team directly involved in patient care. but, in our country pharmacists are mainly engaged with manufacturing o...