BACKGROUND The main challenge in the context of health care reforms and priority setting is the establishment and/or maintenance of fairness and standard of care. For the political process and interdisciplinary discussion, the subjective perception of the health care system might even be as important as potential objective criteria. Of special interest are the perceptions of academic discipline...

BY DOUGLAS A. HASTINGS S en. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) complained last week that the press had done a disservice to the country by virtually ignoring in its coverage of the health care reform bills the important payment and delivery system reform provisions. Now that the fate of comprehensive federal reform is uncertain, health care providers should not make the same mistake. Indeed, the loss of mom...

A new telephone health advice service implemented in September 2000 is integral to the Capital Health (Edmonton) Region's strategy to build a comprehensive approach to primary healthcare. Capital Health Link operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week and was the first comprehensive nurse-based health advice phone line in Alberta.

Although some methods for eliciting preferences to assist participatory priority setting in health care in developed countries are available, the same is not true for poor communities in developing countries whose preferences are neglected in health policy making. Existing methods grounded on self-interested, monetary valuations that may be inappropriate for developing country settings where co...

BACKGROUND Healthcare system reform of Sanming city has become a leading healthcare reform model in China. It has developed a rigorous pharmaceutical reform consisted of the Zero Mark-up Drug Policy and the Centralized Procurement of Medicine Policy to bring down drug expenses and total health expenditures. However, despite the credit and much attention have been given to Sanming's pharmaceutic...

we typically think of acutely and chronically mentally ill patients as those who belong in psychiatric hospitals and the latter category of patients belonging in “regular” hospitals, but the intersection of physical and mental illness draws attention to important challenges for policy-makers and organizational leaders. this article illuminates some broad trends in the health status of people wi...

health reforms that emphasize public health and improvements in primary care can be cost-effective measures to achieve health improvements, especially in developing countries that face severe resource constraints. in their paper “shanghai rising: health improvements as measured by avoidable mortality since 2000,” gusmano et al suggest that shanghai’s health policy-makers have been successful in...

Economists would have formulated several aspects of the health care reform debate differently than policy entrepreneurs did. Economists would have questioned whether health care costs must be contained and whether either competition or global budgets were a "magic bullet" for doing so. They also would have emphasized the distortive costs of subsidies and taxes necessary to reach universal cover...