Intercultural mediators are employed to resolve linguistic and cultural barriers in a variety of health-care contexts. This report examines the main roles performed by intercultural mediators in health care across the WHO European Region and analyses evidence on their effectiveness in improving accessibi...
The provision of effective health care to linguistically and culturally diverse migrant populations has been identified as a crucial public health issue. This scoping review examines strategies that have been implemented and evaluated to address communication barriers experienced by refugees and migrants...
Health systems performance assessment (HSPA) varies across the WHO European Region. This review summarizes HSPA domains and indicators used by Member States in their HSPA or health system-related reports. Thirty Member States published in the English language and from their latest documents, 1485 distinc...
Gender differences in health and in how well health systems and health care
services meet the needs of women and men are well known: in Europe, there
are variations in terms of life expectancy, the risk of mortality and morbidity,
health behaviours and in the use of health care services. There is also in...
Improved health care, lifestyle changes and changing demography mean that
more people are living longer and often with chronic diseases that cannot
currently be cured. Advances in health care that support longer life are to be
celebrated, but health care systems cannot cope with the increasing incidence
...
Policy issues• Health technology assessment (HTA) is an important tool for informing effective regulation of the diffusion and use of health technologies.• The key policy issues surrounding the use of HTA fall into three areas: (a) the bodies, decision-makers and other stakeholders involved, (b) the ...
The terms vertical and integrated are widely used in health service delivery, but
each describes a range of phenomena. In practice, the dichotomy between
them is not rigid, and the extent of verticality or integration varies between
programmes – including (1) a vertically funded, managed, delivered and...
The term “quality tools” is used in many different ways to refer to a method used by an individual, a team, an organization or a health system. It is most often used in a narrow sense in American texts to refer to a set of simple “continuous quality improvement” methods (CQI tools). More broadly,...
“Grey zone” treatments are those that rely upon the patient’s judgement of associated benefits versus harms. When clinicians judge patients are eligible for “grey zone” treatments, their acceptance should be consistent with informed patients’ values. The question is how can one obtain informe...
In most countries the pressure for health care reform is aimed at improving the efficiency, equity and effectiveness of the health sector. Emerging evidence shows that health care reforms can affect men and women differently, as a consequence of their different positions as users and producers of health ...
