In their 2016 article, Saltman and Duran provide a thoughtful examination of the governance challenges involved in different care delivery models adopted in primary care and hospitals in two European countries. This commentary examines the limited potential of structural changes to achieve real reform and considers that, unless governance arrangements actually succeed in penetrating organizatio...

This paper develops a simple model of payment incentives and empirically evaluates provider payment reform in Hainan Province, China. We use a pre-post study design with a control group to analyse two years of claims data to assess the impact of a January 1997 change to prospective payment for a sub-sample of the hospitals. This difference-in-difference empirical strategy allows us to isolate t...

Driven by reimbursement incentives for increased access, improved quality and reduced cost, the patient-centered medical home model of health care delivery is being adopted in primary care practices across the nation. The transition from traditional primary care models to patient-centered medical homes presents many challenges, including the assembly of a well-prepared, interprofessional provid...

To cite: Goldbeck-Wood S. J Fam Plann Reprod Health Care 2017;43:3–4. BACKGROUND A moment when the world0s most powerful country has just elected one of its most anti-abortion presidents might seem an odd time for UK abortion care providers to be seeking the liberalisation of Britain0s abortion law. But 50 years on from the passing of the 1967 Abortion Act, abortion care in the UK is heading to...

The authors of this brief interviewed stakeholders in states with high-ranking and low-ranking health system performance, according to The Commonwealth Fund's State Scorecard on Health System Performance. Findings suggest there are market, political, and cultural characteristics that can help or hinder health system improvement. High-performing states are more likely to have: (1) a history of c...

The Healthcare 2010 conference at the Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale in April focused on how different stakeholders in the healthcare industry can excel in light of the recent landmark health-reform bill. A session titled "Maintaining Efficiency and Quality in an Ever Changing System" provided valuable insights into several perceptions of these two tenets, with respect to both the current state o...

a central problem in designing effective models of provider governance in health systems has been to ensure an appropriate balance between the concerns of public sector and/or government decision-makers, on the one hand, and of non-governmental health services actors in civil society and private life, on the other. in tax-funded european health systems up to the 1980s, the state and other publi...

Breaking bad news is a complex task that requires multiple communication skills from health professionals. Clinical practice demands to communicate all type of bad news, from a diagnosis of cancer to adverse effects of a treatment. On the other hand, since the beginning of the health reform in 2003, the need to improve the quality of services was proposed, among which the concern about the righ...

Recent developments in health reform related to the passage of the Affordable Care Act and ensuing regulations encourage delivery systems to engage in shared decision making, in which patients and providers together make health care decisions that are informed by medical evidence and tailored to the specific characteristics and values of the patient. To better understand how delivery systems ca...