background and purpose: more than a third of the world’s population lack access to essential medicines, despite the presence of several international agreements that proclaim health as a human right. corruption, in its many forms, such as bribery and embezzlement, causes several detrimental effects on the health sector and access to medicines including economic, health, and government image and...

The health sector consistently appears prominently in surveys of perceived corruption, with considerable evidence that this has serious adverse consequences for patients. Yet this issue is far from prominent in the international health policy discourse. We identify five reasons why the health policy community has been reluctant to talk about it. These are the problem of defining corruption, the...

While various forms of corruption are common in many health systems around the world, defining wrongdoing in terms of legality and the use of public office for private gain obstructs our understanding of its nature and intractability. To address this, I suggest, we must not only break the silence about the extent of wrongdoing in the health sector, but also talk differe...

1 Kirkwood B, Hurt L, Amenga-Etego CT, et al, for the ObaapaVitA Trial Team. Eff ect of vitamin A supplementation in women of reproductive age on maternal survival in Ghana (ObaapaVitA): a cluster-randomised, placebo-controlled trial. Lancet 2010; 375: 1640–49. 2 Christian P, West KP, Labrique A, et al. Eff ects of maternal vitamin A or beta-carotene supplementation on maternal and infant morta...

This companion paper suggests the potential benefits of applying Steven Lukes’ dimensions of power model to the study of corruption in health systems. Lukes’ model sets out three “faces of power” classified by their influence on political discourse, resulting in overt, covert and latent discussion of issues depending on the degree of their alignment with the agenda of d...

Hutchinson et al offer a compelling argument for greater attention to and work in corruption in healthcare. We indeed need to talk about corruption, to understand and to grasp how to prevent and address it. This paper lays out some of the rationale for how to define the research questions, how best to address corruption – arguing that governance rather than corruption may offer a preferred star...

Recent scholarly attention has focused on weak governance and the negative effects of corruption on the provision of health services. Employing agency theory, this article discusses corruption in the South African health sector. We used a combination of research methods and triangulated data from three sources: Auditor-General of South Africa reports for each province covering a 9-year period; ...