Globalization and health equity: The impact of structural adjustment programs on developing countries

Among the many drivers of health inequities, this article focuses on important, yet insufficiently understood, international-level determinants: economic globalization and the organizations that spread market-oriented policies to the developing world. One such organization is the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which provides financial assistance to countries in economic trouble in exchange for policy reforms. Through its ‘structural adjustment programs,’ countries around the world have liberalized and deregulated their economies. We examine how policy reforms prescribed in structural adjustment programs explain variation in health equity between nations—approximated by health system access and neonatal mortality. Our empirical analysis uses an original dataset ...

Health in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: from framework to action, transforming challenges into opportunities

The clock is ticking and just a little more than 10 years remain to meet the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Enhanced political and public awareness, inter- and transdisciplinary engagement, new partnerships, and multisectoral collaborations are required to foster knowledge-and-action societies in order to tackle the complex issues that are inherent to sustainable development. A one-day symposium held in Basel, Switzerland, in November 2018 offered a venue for open exchange on how to stimulate dialogue for co-creating innovative ideas and scalable action to address some of the most pressing challenges of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Clinical leadership and integrated primary care: A systematic literature review

As numbers of chronically ill patients with complex healthcare needs are increasing, primary care professionals will be challenged to deliver integrated care. Integrated care is about ‘delivering seamless care for patients with complex long-term problems cutting across multiple services, providers and settings.
Leaders are needed to address healthcare changes essential for implementation of integrated primary care. What kind of leadership this needs, which professionals should fulfil this role and how these leaders can be supported remains unclear.

Challenges to patient centredness – a comparison of patient and doctor experiences from primary care

Many countries and international organisations, such as OECD and WHO, have chosen patient centredness as the approach to ensure that the patients’ needs, values, and preferences are appropriately considered in the health care meetings. Whereas most OECD countries show progress in implementing patient-centred care, no country performs in the top group on all indicators in cross-country comparison. Patient-centred consultation methodologies vary, but reoccurring components can be identified in the literature, such as the patient’s narrative and collaboration.
This article designed an observational study to investigate the level of patients’ and doctors’ ratings of patient-centred aspects of the primary care ...

The impact of a comprehensive electronic patient portal on the health service use: an interrupted time-series analysis

EPPs hold promise for reducing hospital readmissions. Certain patient populations with chronic conditions may differentially benefit from portal use depending on their needs for communication with their providers.
However, there is little empirical research on the potential benefit that electronic patient portals (EPP) can have on the care quality and health outcomes of diverse multi-ethnic international populations. The purpose of this study is to determine the extent to which an EPP was associated with improvements in health service use.

Service Delivery Models to Maximize Quality of Life for Older People at the End of Life: A Rapid Review

In an era of unprecedented global aging, a key priority is to align health and social services for older populations in order to support the dual priorities of living well while adapting to a gradual decline in function. The aimed of this review was to provide a comprehensive synthesis of evidence regarding service delivery models that optimize the quality of life (QoL) for older people at the end of life across health, social, and welfare services worldwide.

Measuring patient-centred system performance: a scoping review of patient-centred care quality indicators

Patient-centred care (PCC) is one of the six dimensions of healthcare and was formally described by the Institute of Medicine in 2001 as healthcare that respects and responds to the preferences, needs and values of the individual patients throughout all healthcare decisions. PCC is an approach that has become central to policies and programming to improve healthcare efficiencies and address patient safety issues.
In that sense, The shift to the patient-centred care (PCC) model as a healthcare delivery paradigm calls for systematic measurement and evaluation. In an attempt to develop patient-centred quality indicators (PC-QIs), this study aimed to identify quality ...

Project INTEGRATE: Developing a Framework to Guide Design, Implementation and Evaluation of People-centred Integrated Care Processes

People-centred integrated care is an acknowledged approach to improve the quality and effectiveness of health systems in delivering care around people’s needs and preferences. Nevertheless, more guidance on how to effectively design, implement and evaluate the care process of people-centred integrated care services is needed. Under Project INTEGRATE, a framework was developed to guide managers in the assessment, transformation and delivery of these health service innovations.

Why integrated care already owns the future

Integrated care has certainly arrived in the primary care clinic. Evidence and momentum began building 20 years ago with the demonstrated effectiveness of collaborative care programs for depression and anxiety disorders in primary care. Since then, various forms of integrated care have been repeatedly proven effective across a range of care settings, patient populations, languages and cultures.

Integrated care models are well adapted to thrive during the Fourth Industrial Revolution in health care. Because integrated care has embraced flexibility and disruption, integrated care models will succeed—or even dominate—in a future that will demand flexibility.

How Equity-Oriented Health Care Affects Health: Key Mechanisms and Implications for Primary Health Care Practice and Policy

Significant attention has been directed toward addressing health inequities at the population health and systems levels, yet little progress has been made in identifying approaches to reduce health inequities through clinical care, particularly in a primary health care context. Although the provision of equity?oriented health care (EOHC) is widely assumed to lead to improvements in patients’ health outcomes, little empirical evidence supports this claim. To remedy this, this study tested whether more EOHC predicts more positive patient health outcomes and identified selected mediators of this relationship