Impressive progress has been made in global surgery in the past 10 years, and now serious and evidence-based national strategies are being developed for scaling-up surgical services in sub-Saharan Africa. Key to achieving this goal requires developing a realistic country-based estimate of burden of surgical disease, developing an accurate estimate of existing need, deve...

Although an official definition by the World Health Organization (WHO) or any other authority is currently lacking, hospital detention practices (HDP) can be described as: “refusing release of either living patients after medical discharge is clinically indicated or refusing release of bodies of deceased patients if families are unable to pay their hospital bills.” Reports of HDP are very scarc...

Vietnam has pursued universal health insurance coverage for two decades but has yet to fully achieve this goal. This paper investigates the barriers to achieve universal coverage and examines the validity of facilitating factors to shorten the transitional period in Vietnam. A comparative study of facilitating factors toward universal coverage of Vietnam and Korea reveals significant internal f...

Universal coverage embodies a critical underlying social value; the recognition that those goods and services that support health, however we define it, have to be available and accessible to all. The choice of which of these goods and services are considered essential, the mechanisms by which they would be financed and so on are almost secondary to this basic consensus, that coverage has to be...

background out of eight commonly agreed millennium development goals (mdg), six are related to the attainment of universal health coverage (uhc) throughout the globe. this universalization of health status suggests policies to narrow the gap in access and benefit sharing between different socially and economically underprivileged classes with that of the better placed ones and a consequent expa...

BACKGROUND Medicines are a major driver of quality, safety, equity, and cost of care in low and middle-income country health systems. Universal health coverage implementers must explicitly address appropriate use of medicines to realize the health benefits of medicines, avoid wasting scarce resources, and sustain the financial viability of universal health coverage schemes. DISCUSSION Medicin...