Traditional health practitioners (THPs) play a significant role in South African healthcare. However, the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA) does not consider sick notes issued by THPs to be valid. This creates a dilemma for employees, whose right to consult a practitioner of their choice is protected by the Constitution. We assessed the current legislation and highlight the challenges t...

background in recent years, accreditation of private hospitals followed by decentralisation of the italian national health service (nhs) into 21 regional health systems has provided a good empirical ground for investigating the tiebout principle of “voting with their feet”. we examine the infra-regional trade-off between greater patient choice (due to an increase in hospital services supply) an...

Access to and utilisation of quality healthcare promotes positive child health outcomes. However, to be optimally utilised, the healthcare system needs to be responsive to the expectations of the population it serves. Health systems in many sub-Saharan African countries, including Malawi, have historically focused on promoting access to health services by the rural poor. However, in the context...

There is emerging interest in the use of discrete choice experiments as a means of quantifying the perceived balance between benefits and risks (quantitative benefit-risk assessment) of new healthcare interventions, such as medicines, under assessment by regulatory agencies. For stated preference data on benefit-risk assessment to be used in regulatory decision making, the methods to generate t...

this commentary reviews a recent piece by burton and rycroft-malone on the use of resource based view (rbv) in healthcare organizations. it first outlines the core content of their piece. it then discusses their attempts to extend rbv to the analysis of large scale quality improvement efforts in healthcare. some critique is elaborated. the broader question of why rbv seems to be migrating into ...

background: increasing hospital costs and its social and cultural problems has led to the idea of providing healthcare services at home. because of infrastructural and implementation problems, providing healthcare at home in iran has not been initiated yet. therefore, this study set out to elaborate the need for a comprehensive system in order to provide this service in iran. methods: all artic...

Abstract This paper uses a discourse-rhetorical approach to analyze how Ontario midwives and their clients interactionally accomplish the healthcare communicative process of “informed choice.” Working with four excerpts from recorded visits between Ontario midwives and women, the analysis focuses on the discursive rendering during informed choice conversations of two contrasting kinds of eviden...

BACKGROUND Current policy advocates individual choice across a number of domains, including healthcare provision. AIM To develop a new tool for measuring people's beliefs about the value of choice in the context of healthcare provision. DESIGN OF STUDY Cross-sectional survey. SETTING Four general practices in South East England. METHOD Nine items relating to health and general domains, ...

This paper presents findings on conditions of healthcare delivery in Afghanistan. There is an ongoing debate about barriers to healthcare in low-income as well as fragile states. In 2002, the Government of Afghanistan established a Basic Package of Health Services (BPHS), contracting primary healthcare delivery to non-state providers. The priority was to give access to the most vulnerable group...

in a recent editorial in this journal pierre-gerlier forest foretells a coming revolution in health policy based on the synthesis of four conceptual innovations and one technological breakthrough. as much as i agree with the intellectual story told in this editorial i present a more skeptical view of the effect of paradigm shifts on healthcare systems on the ground. i argue that ideas triumph w...