Without evidence-informed action, health-related Millennium Development
Goals as well as those of individual nations are unlikely to be achieved.
Health policies are influenced by a variety of factors – values and beliefs,
stakeholder power, institutional constraints, and donor funding flows, among
oth...
Health care systems face ever changing and
often competing demands for resources. For
a health care system to be sustainable it must
be able to pay for investment in buildings
and equipment, training and remuneration
of personnel and for drugs and other consumables. How these financial resources are
gene...
In this policy brief, we will take a fresh look
at the hospital, and examine the questions
that policy-makers need to be asking about
its role in the health care system.
Although most health care takes places
outside hospitals, for most people, they have
come to symbolize the health care system.
The capa...
The concept of screening in health care – that is, actively seeking to identify
a disease or pre-disease condition in individuals who are presumed and
presume themselves to be healthy – grew rapidly during the twentieth
century and is now widely accepted in most of the developed world. Used
wisely, i...
Most existing organizational models for knowledge brokering comprise
a set of design features that reflect an evolving effort, typically by
researchers and research organizations, to balance a variety of competing
objectives such as independence and relevance. These design features are
rarely selected to...
Policy-makers, stakeholders and knowledge brokers (including researchers) all
have a great deal they can learn from one another. Policy-makers need access
to good-quality health systems information that they can apply to a local issue.
Stakeholders may seek to influence health policy as well as make deci...
Health systems in Europe face a number of increasingly complex challenges.
Globalization, evolving health threats, an ageing society, fi nancial constraints on
government spending, and social and health inequalities are some of the most
pressing. Such challenges require not only different funding and org...
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
...
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...
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...
