This article analyzes the evolution of the participatory process in women's movements, especially those related to feminism, in the elaboration of health care policies to women in Brazil, from the 1970s until the present time. For this purpose, it is based on bibliography and on documentary analysis. The article determines the collaboration character that predominated in the beginning of the fe...

BACKGROUND Providing appropriate palliative care for older people is a major task for health care systems worldwide, and up to now it has also been one of the most neglected. Focusing on the German health care system, we sought to explore the attitudes of health professionals regarding their understanding of palliative care for older patients and its implementation. METHODS In a qualitative s...

BACKGROUND According to EU policy, anyone in need of palliative care should be able to have access to it. It is therefore important to investigate which palliative care topics are subject to legislation and regulations in Europe and how these are implemented in (national) health care plans. This paper aims to deliver a structured overview of the legislation, existing regulations and the differe...

Across Western Europe, social welfare regimes are under stress. Social scientists have been announcing “the crisis of the welfare state” for a half century-and now a crisis may actually be upon us. As a result, health care policy is up for political grabs. Everywhere states are rethinking their approaches to health care; competitive forces are stirring, often organized and directed by public of...

In previous editorials in this series (i, 2), we described a path that leads from health care research evidence to evidence-based health care. The steps include getting the evidence straight, developing evidence-based clinical policy, and then applying the policy. A policy is a statement of what should be done. Policies come in many forms. Health policies, for example, determine the funding of ...

Sector-wide approaches (SWAps) in health were developed in the early 1990s in response to widespread dissatisfaction with fragmented donor-sponsored projects and prescriptive adjustment lending. SWAps were intended to provide a more coherent way to articulate and manage government-led sectoral policies and expenditure frameworks and build local institutional capacity as well as offer a means to...

Although much research has been done on the existence and formation of risk and issue based health policies, there is only little insight in health policy development processes in a broader context. This hampers intervention in these policy processes to adequately develop integrated and effective health policies. Legislation in the Netherlands requires municipalities to develop and implement lo...

During the past six decades, data analysis and research studies have been instrumental in shaping public and private health care policy. Policymakers obtain the knowledge they need for making policy decisions through exposure to and examination of data generated through research studies, experimentation, demonstrations, and analyses. In this article, U.S. hospital care policy has been divided i...

Following the development discussion in the last volume on the 'politics of health', Jennifer Prah Ruger argues that the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) represents a shift in global health policy that recognizes the importance of addressing health needs on multiple fronts and integrating public policies into a comprehensive set of health improvement strategies. She argues that th...

George Rosen's "From Medical Police to Social Medicine" is a collection of essays he wrote during the past thirty years, ranging, as the title states, from medical police to social medicine. The underlying thesis of many of the essays is that the theories, the policies, and the practices of public health can be understood fully only against the backdrop of the social, economic, and political ch...