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...

A recent editorial by Naoki Ikegami has proposed three key lessons from Japan’s experience of achieving virtually universal coverage with primary healthcare services: the need to integrate the existing providers of primary healthcare services into the organised health system; the need to limit government commitments to finance hospital services and the need to empower providers of primary healt...

INTRODUCTION We don’t often think of health disparities as a theme unifying communities across the world, regardless of geography or level of economic development. Still, poor levels of health come as little surprise in the midst of endemic poverty, with 40% of the world living on less than $2 a day and great slices of African and Asian populations living on less than $1 a day (1,2). While the ...

While Japan's success in achieving universal health insurance over a short period with controlled healthcare costs has been studied from various perspectives, that of beneficiaries have been overlooked. We conducted a secondary analysis of an opinion poll on health insurance in 1967, immediately after reaching universal coverage. We found that people continued to face a slight barrier to health...

the health sector, a foremost service sector in nigeria, faces a number of challenges; primarily, the persistent under-funding of the health sector by the nigerian government as evidence reveals low allocations to the health sector and poor health system performance which are reflected in key health indices of the country.notwithstanding, there is evidence that the private sector could be a key...

Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies could remake global health financing and usher in an era global health equity and universal health coverage. We outline and provide examples for at least four important ways in which this potential disruption of traditional global health funding mechanisms could occur: universal access to financing through direct transactions without third parties; nov...

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as a "resource for everyday living, not the objective of living"; however, worldwide, there remains an unmistakable inequity in level of health and access to healthcare. The WHO has published documents on financing health systems towards universal health coverage [1], promoting healthy life [2], improving performance of health systems [3], and ...

Very little real therapeutic progress was made in 2015, while a large number of unsafe or poorly evaluated drugs were authorised. The exorbitant prices for some drugs endanger universal healthcare, sometimes obliging health professionals to choose riskier options for their patients. Health professionals, health authorities and drug companies are jointly responsible for guaranteeing access to qu...

We describe variations in healthcare workers' attitudes toward double gloving and reporting needlesticks, and in their readiness to comply with double gloving and hepatitis B vaccine. Differences related to occupation, specialty, and gender have implications for the need to tailor interventions for specific groups of healthcare workers to improve compliance with Universal Precautions.

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...