O of the major social policy issues facing the United States in the first decade of the twenty-first century is the large number of Americans lacking health insurance. While other industrialized nations guarantee universal health care for their citizens, 47 million persons in the United States, or 18 percent of the nonelderly population (the elderly are universally covered under the Medicare pr...

Impressive progress has been made in global surgery in the past 10 years, and now serious and evidence-based national strategies are being developed for scaling-up surgical services in sub-Saharan Africa. Key to achieving this goal requires developing a realistic country-based estimate of burden of surgical disease, developing an accurate estimate of existing need, deve...

Although an official definition by the World Health Organization (WHO) or any other authority is currently lacking, hospital detention practices (HDP) can be described as: “refusing release of either living patients after medical discharge is clinically indicated or refusing release of bodies of deceased patients if families are unable to pay their hospital bills.” Reports of HDP are very scarc...

OBJECTIVE to discuss possibilities of nursing contribution for universal health coverage. METHOD a qualitative study, performed by means of document analysis of the World Health Organization publications highlighting Nursing and Midwifery within universal health coverage. RESULTS documents published by nursing and midwifery leaders point to the need for coordinated and integrated actions in...

introduction: this in vitro study evaluated the influence of composite thickness (with or without fiber reinforcement) on fracture resistance of direct restorations in endodontically treated teeth. methods and materials: fifty-six intact human premolars were chosen and randomly divided into four groups ( n =14). after preparation of a mesio-occluso-distal (mod) cavities and cusp reduction, the ...

Much debate about universal coverage has focused on expanding population coverage: who is covered by which scheme, how to cover those outside the formal sector, and whether the financing of universal coverage should be contributory or not. But population coverage is only one of the three dimensions of the universal coverage “cube”. Achieving the promise of universal coverage – that everyone sho...

Before 2002, 30% of the entire Thai population of 63 million people remained uninsured. With the advent of the Universal Coverage Scheme (UCS) that combined a medical welfare lowincome card scheme and a government-subsidized voluntary health card scheme with a coverage extension to the remaining uninsured, Thailand achieved the status of universal health coverage (UHC) in 2002 in terms of insur...

The recent UN General Assembly resolution calling for universal health coverage (UHC) was testimony to the continuing high-level political commitment to achievement of global health goals—an achievement that has the potential to transform health systems, especially for the poorest people. Fulfi lment of this potential, however, requires a clear defi nition of the term UHC otherwise it could suf...

The WHO launched a Global Action Plan on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in 2015. World leaders in the G7, G20 and the UN General Assembly have declared AMR to be a global crisis. World leaders have also adopted universal health coverage (UHC) as a key target under the sustainable development goals. This paper argues that neither initiative is likely to succeed in isolation from the other and th...

Designing and implementing a health financing policy for universal coverage is relatively simple in principle but complex in practice. This issue of the Bulletin explores how it can be done, drawing lessons from several country experiences. Equity of access to health services of all types is key to universal coverage policy. High levels of out-of-pocket payments, including user fees, are still ...