Key Sources for Population Health Policy

Iranian Population Policy and Aging: New Health Concerns

Shaping Policy Change in Population Health: Policy Entrepreneurs, Ideas, and Institutions

Political realities and institutional structures are often ignored when gathering evidence to influence population health policies. If these policies are to be successful, social science literature on policy change should be integrated into the population health approach. In this contribution, drawing on the work of John W. Kingdon and related scholarship, we set out to examine how key componen...

Social Relationships Are Key to Health, and to Health Policy

Evidence from observational studies has documented the association between social relationships and beneficial effects on health outcomes, such as mortality [1]. However, the precise size of this effect, and of which aspects that form part of social relationships are most strongly linked with positive outcomes, remain unclear. Now, a systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature [2] she...

A Third Way for Health Policy?

Economics has hit the mainstream in the last decade with popular books like Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist reaching the masses. These authors have used their toolkits far beyond the narrow scope of money and finance and answered questions pertaining to anything from social policy to demographics to crime. Their appeal has largely been their ability to explain that small underlying fo...

Policy Capacity for Health Reform: Necessary but Insufficient; Comment on “Health Reform Requires Policy Capacity”

Forest and colleagues have persuasively made the case that policy capacity is a fundamental prerequisite to health reform. They offer a comprehensive life-cycle definition of policy capacity and stress that it involves much more than problem identification and option development. I would like to offer a Canadian perspective. If we define health reform as re-orienting the health system from acut...