BACKGROUND The expectation that insurance coverage mitigates health disparities and equalizes use of healthcare assumes that services are equally accessed; however, the insured low-income target population in this research had a mammography rate of 23.4%, well below the general population. Our objective was to determine the most effective intervention to improve mammography use in low-income wo...

BACKGROUND Iranian traditional primary health care (PHC) system, although proven to be successful in some areas in rural populations, suffers major pitfalls in providing PHC services in urban areas especially the slum urban areas. The new government of Iran announced a health reform movement including the health reform in PHC system of Iran. The Health Complex Model (HCM) was chosen as the pref...

STUDY OBJECTIVE With implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, 30 million individuals are predicted to gain access to health insurance. The experience in Massachusetts, which implemented a similar reform beginning in 2006, should provide important lessons about the effect of health care reform on emergency department (ED) utilization. Our objective is to understand the e...

China is a country with vast regional differences and uneven economic development, which have led to widening gaps between the rich and poor in terms of access to healthcare, quality of care, and health outcomes. China's healthcare reform efforts must be tailored to the needs and resources of each region and community. Building and strengthening primary care within the Chinese health care syste...

This article explores the complexity of a health care system reforms in a post-conflict situation. It describes how the health care system was revamped immediately after the war, and then reorganized with Primary Health Care (PHC) as the fulcrum for change. It highlights the coordination problems, typical of a post-war situation when un-coordinated humanitarian assistance pours in. From the van...

In the context of the European political and socio-economic changes of the early 90s, health care reform in Romania has become inevitable, both for patients and for health professionals in the system. The first stage of the health care reform in Romania is focused on decentralization and improving primary health care. The Romanian medical system is currently in the process of changing the menta...

Due to the rapidly aging population, increasing medical expenditure, and foreign pressure on medical education, Japan is confronting the need for major reform in its medical care system, especially regarding primary care. After our economic stagnation began, the medical expense covered by medical insurance has become a major issue. In spite of our good quality of health care, the Japanese gover...

With health care reform underway, the results of the study by Sharma et al emphasize the foundational role of primary care in our multimorbiditybased chronic care system. They found that the majority of patients with 14 high-cost chronic conditions saw general rather than specialist physicians. They suggest that the level of dependence that this chronically ill population has on primary care ma...

BACKGROUND In 2009, Chinese government launched a new healthcare reform, one of the key points of which is to establish National Essential Medicine System (NEMS). Hospital pharmacists are directly related to the implementation of NEMS. This study is to examine knowledge of and attitudes towards the implementation of the NEMS among hospital pharmacists in western China. METHODS We conducted a ...