Many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are currently reforming their national health sectors and also implementing a comprehensive approach to reproductive health care. Three regional workshops to explore how health sector reform could improve reproductive health services have revealed the inherently complex, competing, and political nature of health sector reform and reproduct...

Rev Panam Salud Publica/Pan Am J Public Health 8(1/2), 2000 A roundtable discussion on international cooperation in health reform in the Americas In April 2000 representatives from several international donor organizations conducted an electronic roundtable to look into their “crystal balls” and imagine a future for donor collaboration in health sector reform in the Americas. The participants w...

Health Sector Reform and Social Determinants of Health are central issues for the current international policy debate, considering the turbulent scenario and the threat of economic recession in a global scale. Although these themes have been discussed for a long time, three major issues still calls the attention of the scientific community and health policymakers. The first one is the matter of...

In the last two decades, health sector decentralization policies have been implemented on a broad scale throughout the developing world, usually as part of a broader process of political, economic and technical reform (Litvack et al. 1998). This process has been fuelled by new efforts of democratization and processes for the ‘modernization’ of the state. These movements combined to promote acco...

Latin American national health systems were drastically overhauled by the health sector reforms the 1990s. Governments were urged by donors and by the international financial institutions to make major institutional changes, including the separation of purchaser and provider functions and privatization. This article first analyses a striking paradox of the far-reaching reform measures: contrary...

a central problem in designing effective models of provider governance in health systems has been to ensure an appropriate balance between the concerns of public sector and/or government decision-makers, on the one hand, and of non-governmental health services actors in civil society and private life, on the other. in tax-funded european health systems up to the 1980s, the state and other publi...

This paper provides an overview of main issues facing the human resources function in the public sector health services in Chile in the late 1990’s. The paper examines the main characteristics of the Chilean health sector, from an HR perspective, and focuses on two key aspects of HR in health services-performance management and the regulation of the work of doctors and nurses. The paper provide...