forest and colleagues have persuasively made the case that policy capacity is a fundamental prerequisite to health reform. they offer a comprehensive life-cycle definition of policy capacity and stress that it involves much more than problem identification and option development. i would like to offer a canadian perspective. if we define health reform as re-orienting the health system from acut...

richard saltman and antonio duran take up the challenging issue of governance in their article “governance, government and the search for new provider models,” and use two case studies of health policy changes in sweden and spain to shed light on the subject. in this commentary, i seek to link their conceptualization of governance, especially its interrelated roles at the macro, meso, and micro...

health reform is the outcome of dispersed policy initiatives in different sectors, at different levels and across time. policy work which can drive coherent health reform needs to operate across the governance structures as well as the institutions that comprise healthcare systems. building policy capacity to support health reform calls for clarity regarding the nature of such policy work and t...

rlabonté et al entitle their paper in this issue of the international journal of health policy and management “the trans-pacific partnership: is it everything we feared for health?” tantalisingly, they do not directly answer the question they pose, and in this commentary, we suggest that it is the wrong question; we should not ‘fear’ the trans-pacific partnership (tpp) at all, rather we should ...

Richard Saltman and Antonio Duran take up the challenging issue of governance in their article “Governance, Government and the Search for New Provider Models,” and use two case studies of health policy changes in Sweden and Spain to shed light on the subject. In this commentary, I seek to link their conceptualization of governance, especially its interrelated roles at the macro, meso, and micro...

The past decade has seen a dynamic and contradictory treatment of difference in French policy-making, both nationally and locally. However, the means by which local difference orientated policies redefine the national is understudied. This article bridges this gap with a case study analysis of Marseille and Lyon to assess and typologize the ways that difference is deployed in local policy to in...

the formulation of global health policy is political; and all institutions operating in the global health landscape are political. this is because policies and institutions inevitably represent certain values, reflect particular ideologies, and preferentially serve some interests over others. this may be expressed explicitly and consciously; or implicitly and unconsciously. but it’s important t...

there is a number of models and strategies for improving the quality of care such as total quality management, continuous quality improvement and clinical governance. the policy of clinical governance is part of the governments overall strategy for monitoring, assuring and improving in the national health services organization. clinical governance has been introduced as a bridge between manager...

Exploring in public policy making of villagers participation is the key point in the scientification and democratization of the policy. This paper takes the deliberative governance model in Zhejiang Province as example to study why and how villagers can participate in rural public policy making and how villagers' wills are taken into account in rural governance in China nowadays. And an effecti...