We analyse nine low-income and lower-middle-income countries in Africa and Asia that have implemented national health insurance reforms designed to move towards universal health coverage. Using the functions-of-health-systems framework, we describe these countries' approaches to raising prepaid revenues, pooling risk, and purchasing services. Then, using the coverage-box framework, we assess th...

Why evaluate primary care? Although the strengthening of primary care services is a priority of health reforms in many countries throughout the WHO European Region, the backgrounds to and reasons for the reforms vary. In western Europe, emphasis on primary care is expected to provide an answer to rising costs and changing demand resulting from demographic and epidemiological trends. Central and...

Recent studies have claimed to show a significant causal impact of education on health status. Their empirical strategy usually relied on changes in compulsory schooling laws. Using a French longitudinal dataset, we focus on the effect of school leaving age on mortality at later ages. The two identifying shocks are the Zay and Berthoin reforms, which respectively raised the minimum school leavi...

background: non-communicable diseases (ncds) and psychological hazards are increasingly observed in industries, necessitating the need to strengthen industrial health systems to control the same. district level data on level of functioning of industrial health systems and services with special focus on systems available for mental health care is lacking in india. this information is vital to pl...

BACKGROUND Despite the expanding literature on how reforms may affect health workers and which reactions they may provoke, little research has been conducted on the mechanisms of effect through which health sector reforms either promote or discourage health worker performance. This paper seeks to trace these mechanisms and examines the contextual framework of reform objectives in Uganda and Ban...

Introduction The Benchmarks of Fairness framework was conceived in the United States of America at the beginning of the 1990s to evaluate planned health insurance reforms. It is now used to evaluate the fairness of health sector reforms (Daniels et al. 2000, 2005) and several developing countries have already used it to strengthen their capacity to assess health-care reforms. In the context of ...

Strengthening the primary care system and promoting utilization of primary care are the major targets of China's ambitious health reforms to meet its people's escalating health care needs. However, the changing trend of primary care utilization 4 years before and after 2009, when the health reforms started, is against the government's stated goal. The percentage of outpatient visits in primary ...

BACKGROUND The Government of the Republic of Kenya is in the process of implementing health care reforms. However, poor knowledge about costs of health care services is perceived as a major obstacle towards evidence-based, effective and efficient health care reforms. Against this background, the Ministry of Health of Kenya in cooperation with its development partners conducted a comprehensive c...

BACKGROUND Cambodia has been reconstructing its economy and health sector since the end of conflict in the 1990s. There have been gains in life expectancy and increased health expenditure, but Cambodia still lags behind neighbours One factor which may contribute is the efficiency of public health services. This article aims to understand variations in efficiency and the extent to which changes ...