background ghana’s national health insurance scheme (nhis), established by an act of parliament (act 650), in 2003 and since replaced by act 852 of 2012 remains, in african terms, unprecedented in terms of growth and coverage. as a result, the scheme has received praise for its associated legal reforms, clinical audit mechanisms and for serving as a hub for knowledge sharing and learning within...

background india’s health sector witnessed some major policy changes in 1990s that aimed at making health services more accessible to the population.   methods in this paper, i tried to present some preliminary results of the significant changes that occurred between 1995/6 and 2004, especially in relation to the question of access to healthcare for the poor and rural population using data from...

INTRODUCTION Brazil and Colombia have pursued extensive reforms of their health care systems in the last couple of decades. The purported goals of such reforms were to improve access, increase efficiency and reduce health inequities. Notwithstanding their common goals, each country sought a very different pathway to achieve them. While Brazil attempted to reestablish a greater level of State co...

BACKGROUND The objective of this international comparative study is to describe and compare the mental health policies in seven countries of Eastern Europe that share their common communist history: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. METHODS The health policy questionnaire was developed and the country-specific information was gathered by local expe...

Motivation in the work context can be defined as an individual's degree of willingness to exert and maintain an effort towards organizational goals. Health sector performance is critically dependent on worker motivation, with service quality, efficiency, and equity, all directly mediated by workers' willingness to apply themselves to their tasks. Resource availability and worker competence are ...

The main study objectives were to highlight male attitudes and practices regarding safe motherhood, and to demonstrate the usefulness of qualitative research methods in studying behaviour-related health problems. The setting was Ekiadolor, a semi-urban Nigerian community with an under-resourced district hospital. The study design was a qualitative research, using Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) ...

background vertically oriented global health initiatives (ghis) addressing the hiv/aids epidemic, including the president’s emergency plan for aids relief (pepfar), have successfully contributed to reducing hiv/aids related morbidity and mortality. however, there is still debate about whether these disease-specific programs have improved or harmed health systems overall, especially with respect...

BACKGROUND There is increasing evidence that good district management practices can improve health system performance and conversely, that poor and inefficient management practices have detrimental effects. The aim of the present study was to identify factors contributing to inefficient management practices of district health managers and ways to improve their overall efficiency. METHODS Nine...

BACKGROUND The implementation of decentralisation reforms in the health sector of Tanzania started in the 1980s. These reforms were intended to relinquish substantial powers and resources to districts to improve the development of the health sector. Little is known about the impact of decentralisation on recruitment and distribution of health workers at the district level. Reported difficulties...

What is happening in and around psychiatric services that raises fears of a harmful separation between psychiatrists and the rest of the medical fraternity? The last National Health Service (NHS) reforms at the beginning of the 1990s split some mental health services into separate organisations from their local acute services. Paragraph 5.14 in the Government’s White Paper The New NHS (NHS Exec...