The difficult current economic climate is riddled with change and uncertainty, and the hospital industry is not immune to the effects. In fact hospitals face an unprecedented series of challenges, including poor economic conditions, increasing competition, and greater reporting requirements. On top of these issues, the healthcare reform law looms, with a great deal of perplexity regarding its u...

News media effects on their audiences are complex. Four commonly cited effects are: informing audiences; agenda-setting; framing; and persuading. The release in autumn 2002 of two reports on options for reforming Canada's healthcare system attracted widespread media attention. We explored the potential for each of the four media effects by examining Canadian newspaper representation of this hea...

The impact of conflict on population health and health infrastructure has been well documented; however the efforts of the international community to rebuild health systems in post-conflict periods have not been systematically examined. Based on a review of relevant literature, this paper develops a framework for analyzing health reform in post-conflict settings, and applies this framework to t...

Among the many reasons that may limit the adoption of promising reform ideas, policy capacity is the least recognized. The concept itself is not widely understood. Although policy capacity is concerned with the gathering of information and the formulation of options for public action in the initial phases of policy consultation and development, it also touches on all stages of the policy proces...

there were once again high expectations that a major global health event - the ebola virus outbreak of 2014-2015 - would trigger meaningfully world health organization (who) reform and strengthen global health governance (ghg). rather than a “turning point,” however, the global community has gone back to business as usual. this has occurred against a backdrop of worldwide political turmoil, cha...

this study aimed to explore the effects of national targeted subsidies policy on health behavior of iranian households.in this qualitative study, data were collected between january 2012 and december 2013 through face-to-face interviews (23 experts in national and provincial levels of health system and 18 household heads) and through a comprehensive and purposive document analysis. the data was...

Healthcare reform has been a constant phenomenon for the last two decades, regardless of being Bismarckian or Beveridgean. The launch of new reforms has increased in pace to a point that was defined, in a recent BMJ article on the UK National Health Service, as ‘constant redisorganisation’. Most of the policy analysis literature on healthcare reforms has been of Anglo-American origin. Consequen...

The past 15 years in Hungary have been characterised by unique changes. Apart from democratisation and managing the immediate crises caused by the collapse of the economy in the early 1990s, a strong part of the reforms was a desire to build Western models of health care and the necessary social and economic infrastructure. Hungary was forced to start substantial reengineering of health service...

The current literature on the politics of social policy has two major shortcomings: health care reforms are undertheoretized and research on Anglophone Africa tends to neglect health reforms. To tackle this, a case study on Kenya presents (failed) re-forms such as universal or categorical free health care or the introduction of health insurance and the expansion of its coverage. The case study ...