OBJECTIVE This paper traces the background of involvement and increasing external activity of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) in the policy and project area. CONCLUSIONS Throughout 2008, representatives of the RANZCP paused to review progress and celebrate successes in the implementation of the College's stated aim to develop an externally focussed polic...

the focus on public policy and health equity is discussed in reference to the current global health policy discussion on universal health coverage (uhc). this initiative has strong commitment from the leadership of the international organizations involved, but a lack of policy clarity outside of the health financing component may limit the initiative’s impact on health inequity. in order to add...

Population aging and changing family patterns have made elder care an important issue. In 1994, German lawmakers enacted a major reform in the country’s long-term care policy, the Dependency Insurance Act (DIA). How, and in what way, will the relative use of formal and informal long-term care services change in response? We address this question using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Eco...

This commentary on the Editorial ‘The politics and analytics of health policy’ by Professor Calum Paton focuses on two issues. First, it points to the unclear links between ideas, ideology, values, and discourse and policy, and warns that discourse is often a poor guide to enacted policy. Second, it suggests that realism, particularly ‘programme theory’ are useful tools for health policy analys...

structure to concepts in biology to the social make-up of the German professoriate to the academic policy of the State. This is material of undoubted importance, not least in relation to Paul Forman's views on German physics, and one hopes to see it developed and refined in future. There are two papers of particular relevance to medical historians: Brian Harrison's provocative and elegantly wri...

This article aims to discuss the concepts of Social Determination of Health and Social Determinants of Health, by establishing a comparison between each of their guiding perspectives and investigating their implications on the development of health policies and health actions. We propose a historical and conceptual reflection, highlighting the Theory on the Social Production of Health, followed...

Link and Phelan (1995) developed the theory of fundamental causes to explain why the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and mortality has persisted despite radical changes in the diseases and risk factors that are presumed to explain it. They proposed that the enduring association results because SES embodies an array of resources, such as money, knowledge, prestige, power, and bene...

While many health services strive to be equitable, accessible and inclusive, peoples' right to health often goes unrealized, particularly among vulnerable groups. The extent to which health policies explicitly seek to achieve such goals sets the policy context in which services are delivered and evaluated. An analytical framework was developed--EquiFrame--to evaluate 1) the extent to which 21 C...

BACKGROUND The importance of assessing research impact is increasingly recognised. Ghana has a long tradition of research dating from the 1970s. In the Ghana Health Service there are three health research centres under the Research and Development Division. Dodowa Health Research Centre (DHRC) is the youngest in the country dating from the 1990s. The objective of this study is to analyse the in...

In their editorial, Speed and Mannion identify two main challenges "the rise of post-truth populism" poses for health policy: the populist threat to inclusive healthcare policies, and the populist threat to well-designed health policies that draw on professional expertise and research evidence. This short comment suggests some conceptual clarifications that might help in thinking through more p...