In the last few years, increasing attention has been paid to the development of health policies. But side by side with the presumed benefits of policy, many analysts share the opinion that a major drawback of health policies is their failure to make room for issues of human resources. Current approaches in human resources suggest a number of weaknesses: a reactive, ad hoc attitude towards probl...

Australia will implement a personally controlled electronic health record (PCEHR) over the next three to five years. Development of an e-health policy framework to support this initiative has involved healthcare providers and patients, but the discussion appears to have bypassed non-patient citizens. There is a risk that this omission may result in difficulties with implementation and uptake of...

Dear Readers: At this, the fifth anniversary of the German Agency for Health Technology Assessment (DAHTA@DIMDI) we present a new medium for a new age: the electronic journal GMSHealth Technology Assessment. The journal expands the current palette of publication media of DIMDI. The agency, DAHTA@DIMDI, thereby utilizes the potential of DIMDI's participation in the German Medical Science portal ...

German Statutory Health Insurance (national health insurance) has remained relatively intact over the past century, even in the face of governmental change and recent reforms. The overall story of German national health insurance is one of political compromise and successful implementation of communitarian values. Several key lessons from the German experience can be applied to the American hea...

This article is fruit of a survey of sources on the history of the Ministry of Health that are part of the Fiocruz collection held at Casa de Oswaldo Cruz's Department of Arquives and Documentation. The study spans the fifty years preceding Brazilian Law 1.920 (July 25, 1953), which placed health and education in separate ministries. It was during this period that the foundations which were to ...

INTRODUCTION Public health policy-making activities are currently split between local authority and NHS organisations. Despite an increasing body of research on evidence-based policy (EBP), few studies explore the process of policy-making. Little is known about how policies are made in a local context, or how (scientific) evidence is used. Previous research has ignored the 'human element' in EB...

Gender inequities in health prevail in most countries despite ongoing attempts to eliminate them. Assessment of gender-sensitive health policies can be used to identify country specific progress as well as gaps and issues that need to be addressed to meet health equity goals. This study selected and measured the existence of gender-sensitive health policies in a low- (Peru), middle- (Colombia),...

This paper analyzes the bond as a strategy for practices of care in public health policies. The analysis was structured around the Foucauldian tools of truth and forms of government that constitute policies of subjectivation. The discussion surrounds the correlation between the National Policy of Primary Health Care and other documents of public policies as part of this approach that makes it p...

The reliability of general self-rated health status is examined using the reform of the public health insurance system of Germany in 2004 as a source of exogenous variation. Among others, the reform introduced a co-payment for ambulatory doctor visits and increased the co-payments for prescription drugs. This natural experiment allows identifi cation of the causal impact of the program on self-...