Health services and policy research (HSPR) represent a multidisciplinary field which integrates knowledge from health economics, health policy, health technology assessment, epidemiology, political science among other fields, to evaluate decisions in health service delivery. Health service decisions are informed by evidence at the clinical, organizational, and policy level, levels with distinct...

The paper reflects upon the legal interpretations of the right to health and its consequences. In order to exemplify the complexity of the theme and its emotional appeal, it analyzes the Supreme Court's decision in a public litigation against the State of Alagoas demanding that medication be supplied. Different interpretations, by both judges and health professionals, of the notion of integral ...

This work deals with understanding equity in health within the framework of an ethical-political discussion of justice; current debate on this issue is reviewed and the implications in defining public policy and organising health service systems are shown. The debates historicity and how it is carried out in contemporaneous societies is presented so that one or another positions predominance is...

Background and Objectives: As with most countries, in the developing communities, providing high quality services in the field of health care is affected by limited financial resources. Applying the positive stimuli germane to the private sector to public hospital may be one solution to the public sector's problems, and the health care system, in general, for reducing hospital construction and ...

Epidemiologists have a long history of influencing and setting policy designed to improve the public’s health. From John Snow’s studies of cholera leading him to remove the Broad Street pump, to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines for preventing HIV transmission in the workplace [2], epidemiology has historically served as a basis for public health policy. Results from epidemiologi...

OBJECTIVE In the context of the global obesity epidemic, national nutrition policies have come under scrutiny. The present paper examines whose interests - industry or public health - are served by these policies and why. DESIGN Using an exemplary case study of submissions to an inquiry into obesity, the research compared the positions of industry and public health groups with that taken by g...

background negotiations surrounding the trans-pacific partnership (tpp) trade and investment agreement have recently concluded. although trade and investment agreements, part of a broader shift to global economic integration, have been argued to be vital to improved economic growth, health, and general welfare, these agreements have increasingly come under scrutiny for their direct and indirect...

Fair Societies, Healthy Lives (Marmot Review, 2010), the final report of the Marmot Review on health inequalities in England, begins by quoting Pablo Neruda: “Rise up with me against the organization of misery” (p. 2). This passionate call to arms seems well-suited for a treatise that promises cures to some of society’s greatest ills. Commissioned by the British Secretary of State for Health, t...