This paper reviews Italian Development Assistance for Health and overall contribution to Global Health from 2001 to 2012. It analyses strategies and roles of central and decentralized authorities as well as those of private non-profit and corporate actors. The research illustrates a very low and unstable official contribution that lags far behind internationally agreed upon objectives, a highly...

BACKGROUND Preparing long term reformatory plan for the health system, like other macro plans, requires guiding principles which is according to the values, and as a bridge, connect the ideals and values to the goals. This study was designed with the purpose of explaining the values and principles of health system, and as a pre-requisite to compilation of Iran's health system reform plan at 202...

Over the past years, raising costs of health care in most countries cause to attract more attention to different aspects in the field. One of the best improvement methodologies known in literature is based on lean principles. The main aim of this methodology is to create values in the system by eliminating losses and creating continuous efforts toward improvement. Therefore, by measuring the pe...

Nutrition for healthy term infants is a joint statement by Health Canada, the Canadian Paediatric Society, Dietitians of Canada and the Breastfeeding Committee for Canada that was most recently updated in September 2012 with recommendations from birth to six months of age. This practice point outlines the development process, principles of infant feeding, and recommendations for clinicians. Hea...

The article is based on a multidimensional conception of healthcare system performance. Our objectives are to assess the performance of the healthcare systems of 27 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and to discern the countries' profiles according to the homogeneity of their healthcare systems' levels of performance. The analyses were carried out on data co...

BACKGROUND Globally, health expenditure as a percentage of GDP has increased in recent years, so evaluating the health care systems used in different countries is an important tool for identifying best practices and improving inefficient health care systems. OBJECTIVE We investigate health system efficiency at the country level based on OECD health data. We focus on several aspects of health ...

While the achievements of the Organisation for Economic CoOperation and Development (OECD) Health Care Quality Indicators (HCQI) Project [1] are laudable and enable international comparisons of health care systems in terms of a particular type of quality, it is important to remember that quality is not value neutral. As Donabedian pointed out, 1981, explicit measures of quality carry with them ...

OBJECTIVE To collect, compile and evaluate publicly available national health accounts (NHA) reports produced worldwide between 1996 and 2010. METHODS We downloaded country-generated NHA reports from the World Health Organization global health expenditure database and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) StatExtract website. We also obtained reports from Abt Assoc...

A greater focus on the role of health systems in health, development, and economic growth has led health policy research and analysis, domestic and global, to scrutinize health financing, insurance, and financial protection. Two World Health Reports (2000 and 2010) [1,2] have called for evaluating health system performance in terms of health financing, and the World Health Organization’s (WHO) ...

BACKGROUND Rankings from the World Health Organization (WHO) place the US health care system as one of the least efficient among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Researchers have questioned this, noting simplistic or inappropriate methodologies, poor measurement choice, and poor control variables. Our objective is to re-visit this question by using newer m...