Recent scholarly attention has focused on weak governance and the negative effects of corruption on the provision of health services. Employing agency theory, this article discusses corruption in the South African health sector. We used a combination of research methods and triangulated data from three sources: Auditor-General of South Africa reports for each province covering a 9-year period; ...

Reluctance to talk about corruption is an important barrier to action. Yet the stakes of not addressing corruption in the health sector are higher than ever. Corruption includes wrongdoing by individuals, but it is also a problem of weak institutions captured by political interests, and underfunded, unreliable administrative systems and healthcare delivery models. We ur...

Holistic and multi-disciplinary responses should be prioritized given the depth and breadth through which corruption in the healthcare sector can cover. Here, taking the Peruvian context as an example, we will reflect on the issue of corruption in health systems, including corruption with roots within and outside the health sector, and ongoing efforts to combat it. Our ...

In an editorial titled “We Need to Talk About Corruption in Health Systems” the authors Hutchinson, Balabanova, and McKee hope to encourage a wider conversation about corruption in the health sector. Such conversations are difficult to hold for at least five reasons; it is hard to define corruption; corruption may allow some fragile health systems to subsist, shifting blame – are those involved...

The health sector often appears prominent in surveys of perceived corruption, because citizens experience the symptoms of systemic corruption most distressingly during their interaction with frontline health workers. However, the underlying drivers of systemic corruption in society may be located in other social systems with the health system demonstrating the symptoms ...

There is increasing interest among health policymakers, planners and donors in how corruption affects health care access and outcomes, and what can be done to combat corruption in the health sector. Efforts to explain the risk of abuse of entrusted power for private gain have examined the links between corruption and various aspects of management, financing and governance. Behavioural scientist...

background and purpose: more than a third of the world’s population lack access to essential medicines, despite the presence of several international agreements that proclaim health as a human right. corruption, in its many forms, such as bribery and embezzlement, causes several detrimental effects on the health sector and access to medicines including economic, health, and government image and...

Background Corruption is widespread in Nigeria’s health sector but the reasons why it exists and persists are poorly understood and it is often seen as intractable. We describe a consensus building exercise in which we asked health workers and policy-makers to identify and prioritise feasible responses to corruption in the Nigerian ...

Poor drug access continues to be one of the main global health problems. Global inequalities in access to pharmaceuticals are caused by a number of variables including poverty, high drug prices, poor health infrastructure, and fraud and corruption--the latter being the subject of this article. There is growing recognition among policy makers that corruption in the pharmaceutical system can wast...

The call of the editorial of the International Journal of Health Policy and Management regarding the “Need to talk about corruption in health systems” is spot on. However, the perceived difficulties of why this is so should be explored from an actor’s perspective, as they differ for government actors, donors and the research community. In particular, false dilemmas around definition pr...