In March 2009, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) convened a meeting of “policymakers, researchers, and producers of health care data” to “begin developing a strategy to optimize the availability of information and data for enactment and implementation of health care reform.” The needs described by participants were as expected: timely information about “the likely concrete e...

Over the last thirty years, international organizations have invested heavily in efforts aimed at increasing the provision and improving the efficacy of public services within developing countries. Health sector decentralization have been one of the most common manifestations of this effort to reform governance. However, generalizing about appropriate methodology for evaluating and identifying ...

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a performance-monitoring framework that originated in the business sector but has more recently been applied to health services. The province of Ontario is using the BSC approach to monitor quality of inpatient care in five service areas. Feasibility of the scorecard framework for each area has been assessed using a standard approach. This paper reports results o...

On the 15th of September 2008, a power-sharing agreement was brokered between the major political parties in Zimbabwe, namely, the Tsvangirai-led Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T), the Mutambara-led Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-M) and the then ruling Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF). This Global Political Agreement (GPA) paved the way for the establishment o...

Decentralization in the health sector has been widely implemented since the 1970s as a reform mechanism with mixed results. This study describes Fiji's 2 attempts at decentralizing its health sector and examines the implications they have had for the functions of planning, financing, and delivery of health services. The first wave attempted a major restructure by devolving Fiji's health system....