we typically think of acutely and chronically mentally ill patients as those who belong in psychiatric hospitals and the latter category of patients belonging in “regular” hospitals, but the intersection of physical and mental illness draws attention to important challenges for policy-makers and organizational leaders. this article illuminates some broad trends in the health status of people wi...

The past 15 years in Hungary have been characterised by unique changes. Apart from democratisation and managing the immediate crises caused by the collapse of the economy in the early 1990s, a strong part of the reforms was a desire to build Western models of health care and the necessary social and economic infrastructure. Hungary was forced to start substantial reengineering of health service...

Small-scale fisheries (SSFs) engage the vast majority of the world’s fishers but are struggling to keep pace with coastal populations, and stocks are declining to levels that threaten reproductive capacity. The provision of food and livelihoods to low-income fishers into the future will be unlikely without radical changes to fisheries policy. We draw on repeating analogies of driving a car to i...

Teams of collaborators from Colombia, Mexico, Pakistan, and Thailand have adapted a policy tool originally developed for evaluating health insurance reforms in the United States into "benchmarks of fairness" for assessing health system reform in developing countries. We describe briefly the history of the benchmark approach, the tool itself, and the uses to which it may be put. Fairness is a wi...

Korea recently introduced three major health care reforms: in financing (1999), pharmaceuticals (2000), and provider payment (2001). In these three reforms, new government policies merged more than 350 health insurance societies into a single payer, separated drug prescribing by physicians from dispensing by pharmacists, and attempted to introduce a new prospective payment system. This essay co...