Efforts to mitigate health inequity are at the heart of health policy in Israel and in many developing countries seeking to advance toward universal health coverage. This commentary uses the conceptual framework and the description of health policy interventions presented in a recent IJHPR article to compare policies implemented by Israel's Ministry of Health during 2011-2014 with policies unde...

politics is not the ghost in the machine of global health policy. conceptually, it makes little sense to argue otherwise, while history is replete with examples of individuals and movements engaging politically in global health policy. were one looking for ghosts, a more likely candidate would be democracy, which is currently under attack by a new global health technocracy. civil society moveme...

in this commentary, i argue that beyond a sophisticated supportive architecture to facilitate implementation of actions on the social determinants of health (sdoh) and health inequities, the health in all policies (hiap) project faces two main barriers: lack of awareness within policy networks on the social determinants of population health, and a tendency of health actors to neglect investing ...

We examine the scope of inquiry into the measurement and assessment of the state public health policy environment. We argue that there are gains to be made by looking systematically at policies both within and across health domains. We draw from the public health and public policy literature to develop the concepts of interdomain and intradomain policy comprehensiveness and illustrate how these...

forest and colleagues have persuasively made the case that policy capacity is a fundamental prerequisite to health reform. they offer a comprehensive life-cycle definition of policy capacity and stress that it involves much more than problem identification and option development. i would like to offer a canadian perspective. if we define health reform as re-orienting the health system from acut...

This article addresses policymaking related to Emergency Care Units (ECU) in the State of Rio de Janeiro between 2007 and 2013, duly identifying the relationships between the various levels of government in this process. It prioritized the context of policy formulation, the factors that motivated the inclusion and maintenance of ECUs on the state agenda and the process of how the policy was imp...

Health reform is the outcome of dispersed policy initiatives in different sectors, at different levels and across time. Policy work which can drive coherent health reform needs to operate across the governance structures as well as the institutions that comprise healthcare systems. Building policy capacity to support health reform calls for clarity regarding the nature of such policy work and t...

Forest and colleagues have persuasively made the case that policy capacity is a fundamental prerequisite to health reform. They offer a comprehensive life-cycle definition of policy capacity and stress that it involves much more than problem identification and option development. I would like to offer a Canadian perspective. If we define health reform as re-orienting the health system from acut...

labonté et al provide an insightful analysis of the trans-pacific partnership (tpp) and its impact on a selection of important health determinants. their work confirms concerns raised by previous analyses of leaked drafts and offers governments serious and timely reasons to carefully consider provisions of the agreement prior to moving forward with ratification. it also contributes more general...

background and purpose: health indices, regarding to their role in the development of society, are one of the most important indices at national level. success of national development programs is largely dependent on the establishment of appropriate goals at the health sector, among which access to healthcare facilities is an essential requirement. the aim of this study was to examine the dispa...