While there has been a great deal of information revealing the public's dissatisfaction with our current health care system, there is little detailed analysis of these attitudes, and of the individuals who are most likely to support or reject such a system. This becomes more and more important as health policy debates shift toward a questioning of the viability of the current health care system...

this article is a review of the book “health in all policies: seizing opportunities, implementing policies” edited by kimmo leppo, eeva ollila, sebastián peña, matthias wismar, and sarah cook. this book (printed and online publication) was published by the finnish ministry of social affairs and health, finland in 2013 (1). the book is freely available at http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pd...

Background Health policies are important instruments for improving population health. However, experience suggests that policies designed for the whole population do not always benefit the most vulnerable. Participation of vulnerable groups in the policy-making process provides an opportunity for them to influence decisions related to their health, and also to exercise their rights. This paper ...

background: around one out of two mothers give births by cesarean section (cs) surgery in iran and about half of this number is due to previous cs. recently health sector evolution (hsep) program (started in april 2014) targets the high rate of cs in iran. to assess the impact of the interventions, we emphasized that the first birth cesarean (fbc) proportion is one of the main indicators to ass...

access to the right to the highest attainable level of health is a constitutional right that obliges governments and other players to take step to increase all individuals' chances of obtaining good health. at the least, health and education are two crucial requirements for this as well. iran's vision 2025 is going to lead the country to a developed state with the highest rank of economic, scie...

Background Although there is a general agreement on the benefits of evidence informed health policy development given resource constraints especially in Low-Income Countries (LICs), the definition of what evidence is, and what evidence is suitable to guide decision-making is still unclear. Our study is contributing to filling this knowledge gap. We aimed to explore health policy actors’ views r...

in his recent study, gordon shen analyses a pertinent question facing the global mental health research and practice community today; that of how and why mental health policy is or is not adopted by national governments. this study identifies becoming a world health organization (who) member nation, and being in regional proximity to countries which have adopted a mental health policy as suppor...

let us start with an example of health policy analysis in action. within that category of countries loosely known as ‘the west’, quite basic differences exist in attitudes to health policy and also actual health policy. comparing the us with mainland europe and indeed canada, for example, one perceives a difference in attitude on the part of the majority towards collectivism and individualism i...

This commentary on the Editorial ‘The politics and analytics of health policy’ by Professor Calum Paton focuses on two issues. First, it points to the unclear links between ideas, ideology, values, and discourse and policy, and warns that discourse is often a poor guide to enacted policy. Second, it suggests that realism, particularly ‘programme theory’ are useful tools for health policy analys...