BACKGROUND Forty-one million Americans have no health insurance and, despite the growth of managed care, medical costs are again increasing rapidly. One proposed solution is a single-payer health care financing system with universal coverage. Yet, physicians' views of such a system have not been well studied. METHODS We surveyed a random sample of physicians (from the American Medical Associa...

Grounded in a socio-ecological framework, we describe salient health care system and policy factors that influence engagement in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) clinical care. The discussion emphasizes successful programs and models of service delivery and highlights the limitations of current, fragmented health care system components in supporting effective, efficient, and sustained patient...

This article examines integrality as one of the doctrinal principles of the Brazilian State Health Policy - the Unified Health System (SUS) - whose aim is to offer health care as a right and as a service. Integrality is the foundation around which managerial activity practices are organized and whose main challenge is guaranteeing access to the health care system's most complex assistance level...

This study examined the general and system-related predictors of outpatient satisfaction with tertiary health care institutions in Korea. A cross-sectional descriptive study design was employed. The subjects were 1,194 outpatients recruited from 29 outpatient clinics of a university medical center in Korea. Measurements included 5 outpatient service domains (i.e., doctor service, nurse service,...

All the pressures on the health service are converging on that part of the service that cannot say no. The buck stops with the emergency health care system. It is the first place that the media and the public sees the pressure and points the finger. The accident and emergency (A&E) department sits on the fault line where the "tectonic plates of primary and secondary care meet,"' where the world...

All the pressures on the health service are converging on that part of the service that cannot say no. The buck stops with the emergency health care system. It is the first place that the media and the public sees the pressure and points the finger. The accident and emergency (A&E) department sits on the fault line where the "tectonic plates of primary and secondary care meet,"' where the world...

In recent decades, the health care delivery system in the United States has been greatly transformed and more widely examined. Even with one of the most developed health care systems in the world, the United States still experiences great spatial disparity in health care access. Increasing diversity of class, culture, and ethnicity also has a significant impact on health disparity. The goal of ...

Health sector organisations are undergoing a period of fundamental change. One set of changes is about increasing the capacity of the system to provide integrated client care. This paper discusses the practices that community health care workers have used to approach some basic issues of service integration. Although the discussion is about practices in community health, the issues are importan...