Tensions in public health policy: patient engagement, evidence-based public health and health inequalities.

Delving Into the Details of Evaluating Public Engagement Initiatives; Comment on “Metrics and Evaluation Tools for Patient Engagement in Healthcare Organization- and System-Level Decision-Making: A Systematic Review”

Initiatives to engage the public in health policy decisions have been widely endorsed and used, yet agreed upon methods for systematically evaluating the effectiveness of these initiatives remain to be developed. Dukhanin, Topazian, and DeCamp have thus developed a useful taxonomy of evaluation criteria derived from a systematic review of published evaluation tools that might serve as the basis...

The Why, Who, What, How, and When of Patient Engagement in Healthcare Organizations: A Response to Recent Commentaries

Is Patient Choice the Future of Health Care Systems?

Patient and user choice are at the forefront of the debate on the future direction of health and public services provision in many industrialized countries in Europe and elsewhere. It is used both, as a means to achieve desired policy goals in public health care systems such as greater efficiency and improved quality of care, and as a good with its own intrinsic value. However, the evidence sug...

Is It More Important to Address the Issue of Patient Mobility or to Guarantee Universal Health Coverage in Europe?; Comment on “Regional Incentives and Patient Cross-Border Mobility: Evidence From the Italian Experience”

This paper discusses whether European institutions should devote so much attention and funding to cross-border healthcare or they should instead prioritise guaranteeing universal health coverage (UHC), inequalities and tackling the effects of austerity measures. The paper argues through providing the evidence in both areas of research, that the priority at European level from a public health an...

Health Services Research Spending and Healthcare System Impact; Comment on “Public Spending on Health Service and Policy Research in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States: A Modest Proposal”

The challenges associated with translating health services and policy research (HSPR) evidence into practice are many and long-standing. Indeed, those challenges have themselves spawned new areas of research, including knowledge translation and implementation science. These sub-disciplines have increased our understanding of the critical success factors associated with the uptake of research ev...