Investments in the extension of health insurance coverage, the strengthening of public health services, as well as primary care and better hospitals, highlights the emerging role of healthcare as part of China’s new growth regime, based on an expansion of services, and redistributive policies. Such investments, apart from their central role in terms of relief for low-income people, serve to reb...

The World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) World Health Report 2010, “Health systems financing, the path to universal coverage,” promoted universal health coverage (UHC) as an aspirational objective for country health systems. Yet, in addition to the dimensions of services and coverage, distribution of coverage in the population, and financial risk protection highlighted by the report, the conside...

This is a commentary on Gilbert and colleagues’ (1) paper on morality and markets in the National Health Service (NHS). Morality and values are not ephemeral qualities and universal healthcare is not simply an aspiration; it has to be enshrined in law. The creation of the UK NHS in 1948 was underpinned by core legal duties which required a system of public funding and delivery to follow. The mo...

BACKGROUND No randomized trials have examined the effect of contact precautions or universal glove and gown use on adverse events. We assessed if wearing gloves and gowns during all patient contact in the intensive care unit (ICU) changes adverse event rates. METHODS From January 2012 to October 2012, intervention ICUs of the 20-site Benefits of Universal Gloving and Gowning cluster randomize...

Background: Health equity is “having fair access to healthcare, utilizing it according to actual needs, paying for it based on financial capacity and finally, having an acceptable level of health”. Health equity is an underlying principle of the universal declaration of human rights. Equitable distribution of hospital beds increases people’s access to healthcare services and as a result, improv...

testing can never provide 100% accuracy—that blood from all patients should be assumed to represent occupational risk. This concept, which arrived on the healthcare scene only with the implementation of the universal precautions guidelines in 1987, should have long since permeated the healthcare workplace, beginning in the late 1940s, when the occupational risks for hepatitis B infection were i...

OBJECTIVE Access to care is a pillar of U.S. healthcare reform and could potentially challenge existing ethnic and gender disparities in care. We present a snapshot of these disparities in surgical colon cancer patients in the largest public hospital in Massachusetts, a state leading in providing universal healthcare, to indicate potential changes that might result from universal care access. ...

background the pursuit of equity in health and healthcare has been the key feature of health policy in india. however, despite the policy significance, the volume of literature available on this issue is scarce. therefore, this paper is an attempt to examine the horizontal inequities in healthcare utilization, consisting of outpatient and inpatient care in 15 major states and north-eastern regi...