The charter-protected right of all Canadians to purchase private medical and hospital services and insurance for medically required services was implied in the 2005 landmark judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) case involving Chaoulli/Zeliotis vs Quebec and Canada. This precedent-setting judgment is now part of Canadian case law and jurisprudence. In this SCC case, two sections of Queb...

The countries of Latin America and the Caribbean are facing the gradual phase-out of international-donor support of contraceptive commodities and technical and management assistance, as well as an increased reliance on limited public sector resources and a limited private sector role in providing contraceptives to the public. Therefore, those nations must develop multisectoral strategies to ach...

introduction: the quality of the information provided in the public sector is of a high importance due to the specific purpose of reporting. presenting reliable, complete, and timeliness information of the activities in the governmental sector by using desirable public sector accounting system provides a better opportunity for people's monitoring on the offering of governmental services, transp...

Rural infrastructure is crucial for agriculture, agro-industries and overall economic development of rural areas. It also, incidentally, provides basic amenities that improve the quality of life. However, infrastructure projects, including those in rural sector, involve huge initial investments, long gestation periods, high incremental capital output ratio, high risk and low rate of returns on ...

BACKGROUND Maternal healthcare utilization is a major determinant of maternal mortality. Bangladesh is experiencing a rapid pace of urbanization with all future growth in population expected to be in urban areas. Health care infrastructure is different in urban and rural areas thus warranting an examination of equity in use rates of maternal healthcare. This paper addresses whether the urban-ru...

BACKGROUND Iran started a new public-private partnership model in form of health coopera¬tives which is somehow different from other types of health cooperatives throughout the world. In this study we compared the performance and quality of health services in public health cen¬ters (PHCs) and cooperative health centers (CHCs). METHODS In this comparative study performance quality of two cohor...

BACKGROUND AND METHODOLOGY South Africa's Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act of 1996 provides for safe termination of pregnancy (TOP) in designated facilities in the public and private health sectors. In 2001, mifepristone-misoprostol medical abortion was approved for TOP up to 56 days, but this method is not yet available in the public sector. Information on the operational requirements fo...

In Portugal, Civil Servants may have a differential utilization of health services due to their supplementary Health Subsystem (ADSE), which grants them access to health services in the private sector at lower price. We exploit the impact of this double coverage on the demand for Portuguese Public Emergency Departments (ED), following the recent increase in co-payments for public health care se...

This paper aims at exploring how ICTs can improve decision-making processes and subsequently service performances in public sector services. The authors focus on a specific class of Information Systems: Decision Support Systems (DSS) and Business Intelligence (BI). The research presented will lay the ground for investigating how the impact of these technologies on public services can be evaluat...