This report contains information from the Health Policy Summit, held in conjunction with the Fifth Annual Primary Care Conference and the Tenth Annual HeLa Women's Health Conference. During the Summit's presentation, the Honorable Newt Gingrich offered key elements of his "Vision for a 21st Century Medicaid Solution." The vision focuses on developing a "21st Century Responsible Citizen Medicaid...

In recent years, a large body of empirical work has focused on measuring and explaining socio-economic inequalities in health outcomes and health service use. In any effort to address these questions, analysts must confront the issue of how to measure socioeconomic status. In developing countries, socioeconomic status has typically been measured by per capita consumption or an asset index. Curr...

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are groups of people that interact regularly to deepen their knowledge on a specific topic. Thanks to information and communication technologies, CoPs can involve experts distributed across countries and adopt a 'transnational' membership. This has allowed the strategy to be applied to domains of knowledge such as health policy with a global perspective. CoPs repr...

BACKGROUND: Equality of health status is the health equity goal being pursued in developed countries and advocated by development agencies such as WHO and The Rockefeller Foundation for developing countries also. Other concepts of fair distribution of health such as equity of access to medical care may not be sufficient to equalise health outcomes but, nevertheless, they may be more practical a...

BACKGROUND To explain the possible effects of exposure to weather conditions on population health outcomes, weather data need to be calculated at a level in space and time that is appropriate for the health data. There are various ways of estimating exposure values from raw data collected at weather stations but the rationale for using one technique rather than another; the significance of the ...

As Latin American nation states define their public health agendas, the notion of public responsibility for health has slowly dissipated, and inclinations towards neoliberalism have led to an increasing privatization of health care. When it comes to the privatization of health, Haiti has many similarities to other parts of Latin America, from the Guatemalan highlands to the urban slums of Lima....

Then aims of the current study were 1) to provide cross-national estimates of the prevalence of physical fighting and weapon carrying among adolescents aged 11-15 years; (2) To examine the possible effects of physical fighting and weapon carrying on the occurrence of physical (medically treated injuries) and emotional health outcomes (multiple health complaints) among adolescents within the the...

Health sector organisations are undergoing a period of fundamental change. One set of changes is about increasing the capacity of the system to provide integrated client care. This paper discusses the practices that community health care workers have used to approach some basic issues of service integration. Although the discussion is about practices in community health, the issues are importan...

Health is no longer defined by the narrow ‘germ theory’ of disease; the holistic approach has recognized that health is multifactorial 1 . In addition, the link between education and health is now well established, and growth in literacy rates, particularly among women, has been shown to have a positive impact on health 2 . The 2006 Nepal Demographic Health Survey showed large discrepancies in ...

Internationally, there is extensive empirical evidence that a strong primary care-led health system is associated with improved health outcomes, increased quality of care, decreased health inequalities and lower overall health-care costs. Within primary care, factors influencing access to, and utilisation of, general practitioner (GP) services have been widely examined and this paper focuses on...