A review of reforms in the financing of hospital services in eight European countries and Australia reveals a commitment to a common objective of relating resource use to hospital workload by means of a standardized case-mix framework in the pursuit of greater efficiency. While this objective is also shared with the U.S. prospective payment system (PPS), it is noteworthy that the majority of co...

The countries emerging from the Soviet sphere of influence in the early 1990s inherited Soviet style hospital-dominated health care systems. The countries that were part of the Soviet Union, in particular, had much higher levels of provision, as assessed by numbers of hospital beds, than the countries of western Europe. This capacity has been reduced, forced in large part by shrinking health bu...

The objective of this study was to estimate the number of psychiatric beds occupied per State in Brazil and the amount paid by the Unified National Health System (SUS) for hospitalizations, professional services, tests, and medicines in the country in 2004. The mean number of psychiatric beds occupied, estimated on the basis of total days of hospitalization during the year, and the amount paid ...

This essay focuses on the balance between governmental control and enterprise autonomy by examining the Norwegian hospital reform. We describe the enterprise model and give a description of the policy instruments that the government, as owner, has for exercising power and control vis-à-vis the health enterprises. How the trade-off between autonomy and control is experienced and practiced is ana...

ply of nurses and better track and disseminate information on patient outcomes and nurse workloads. While there is much debate about the pros and cons of these alternatives, participants at the 25th Massachusetts Health Policy Forum generally agreed on the following points: • The number of staff nurses and their skill play a critical role in patient outcomes across a range of conditions in the ...

California has 12 county-owned and operated hospital systems and 5 University of California hospitals designated as public hospitals. These organizations deliver the majority of inpatient care and a significant amount of outpatient care to Medicaid patients in the state. In 2010, California was the first state in the nation to implement a five-year Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRI...

Our paper consists of introductory and main parts, plus conclusions, drawn on macro and microanalysis of selected aspects of the given problem. Its two starting parts create the basis for further explanation, describing general trends of the Slovak health policy and ways how these policies were incorporated into reform documents, and implemented. Three core parts focus on important public polic...