Background In planning for universal health coverage, many countries have been examining their fiscal decentralization policies with the goal of increasing efficiency and equity via “additionalities.” The concept of “additionality,” when the government of a lower administrative level increases the funding allocated to a particular issue when extra funds are present, is often used in these...

Despite it being confusing, inherently inequitable, and subject to excessive federal government control, Australia provides good healthcare.

BACKGROUND There is a great disparity in spatial accessibility to hospital care between ethnic minority and non-minority regions in China. Being one of the basic social demands, spatial access to hospital care in minority regions draws increasing attention in China in recent years. We performed this study to have a better understanding of spatial access to hospital care in ethnic minority regio...

In 2008 United States President Barack Obama declared that health care "should be a right for every American".(1) This statement, although noble, does not reflect US healthcare statistics in recent times, with the number of uninsured reaching over 50 million in 2010.(2) Such disparity has sparked a political drive towards change, and the introduction of the Patient Protection and Affordable Car...

Australian immigration detention centres are in secluded locations, some on offshore islands, and are subject to extreme secrecy, comparable with 'black sites' elsewhere. There are parallels between healthcare professionals working in immigration detention centres and healthcare professionals involved with or complicit in torture. In both cases, healthcare professionals are conflicted between a...

Noncommunicable diseases are a major healthcare problem in Nepal and their burden is increasingevery year. Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) bring additional challenges to the Nepalese healthcaresystem which is already experiencing infrastructure shortages, poor service delivery, inadequate essential medicines coverage and shortages of healthcare workers. The Nepal government provides a limited n...

842 December 2014, Vol. 104, No. 12 The new board of the Hospital Association of South Africa (HASA), elected at its annual general meeting shortly after the association’s annual conference in Sandton this October, brings added depth and a wide variety of skills to the seismic shifts changing the face of healthcare delivery in South Africa. Pledging her association to work with government in fu...