BACKGROUND Hospital policy involves multiple objectives: efficiency of service delivery, pursuit of high quality care, promoting access. Funding policy based on hospital casemix has traditionally been considered to be only about promoting efficiency. DISCUSSION Formula-based funding policy can be (and has been) used to pursue a range of policy objectives, not only efficiency. These are termed...

Health professionals providing health-care services must have the relevant competencies and clinical experiences needed to improve population health outcomes in different contexts. Current models of health profession education often fail to produce a fit-for-purpose workforce ready and willing to provide relevant, quality care to underserved communities. Evidence is emerging that community-enga...

background and objectives: patient satisfaction is an important indicator of the quality of health and healthcare services. most relevant studies in iran have been conducted in the nation’s capital, and there is a lack of large-scale studies in other regions of this country. in order to help filling this gap, this study was designed to undertake a relatively large-scale assessment of patient sa...

background health-related quality of life (hrqol) is used as a measure to valuate healthcare interventions and guide policy making. the euroqol eq-5d is a widely used generic preference-based instrument to measure health-related quality of life. objectives the objective of this study was to develop a value set of the eq-5d health states for an iranian population. patients and methods this study...

introduction: equitable access to a basic set of health services at minimum quality and   affordable price is the right of every citizen and in all countries the governments have the duty to deliver these services to the population. international trade in health services influences the balance between equitable distribution of these services, creating incentives to improve the efficiency of hea...

Many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are currently reforming their national health sectors and also implementing a comprehensive approach to reproductive health care. Three regional workshops to explore how health sector reform could improve reproductive health services have revealed the inherently complex, competing, and political nature of health sector reform and reproduct...

Good health is a function of a range of biological, environmental, behavioral, and social factors. The consumption of quality health care services is therefore only a part of how good health is produced. Although few would argue with this, the economic framework used to allocate resources to optimize population health is applied in a way that constrains the analyst and the decision maker to hea...