Download or read book Innovations in Health Services Delivery from Transition Economies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia written by A. Fidler and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Economic Transition and Health Care Reform written by Adam Leive and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper exploits the staggered adoption of major concurrent health reforms in countries in Europe and Central Asia after 1990 to estimate their impact on public health expenditure, utilization, and avoidable deaths. While the health systems all derived from the same paradigm under central planning, they have since introduced changes to policies regarding cost-sharing, provider payment, financing, and the rationalization of hospital infrastructure. Social health insurance is predicted to increase this share, although the leads of both social health insurance and primary care fee-for-service suggest endogeneity may be an issue with the outpatient share regressions. Provider payment reforms produce the largest impact on spending, with fee-for-service increasing spending and patient-based payment reducing it. The impact on avoidable deaths is generally negligible, but there is some evidence of improvements due to fee-for-service. Considering the corresponding relative reduction in inpatient admissions and the incentives fee-for-service provides to deliver additional services, perhaps there is an overprovision of services in the primary care setting and an underutilization of more specialized hospital services.

Download or read book Welfare Choice and Solidarity in Transition written by János Kornai and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-05-31 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reform of the welfare sector is an important yet difficult challenge for all countries in transition from socialist central planning to market-oriented democracies. Here a scholar of the economics of socialism and post-socialist transition and a health economist take on this challenge. This 2001 book offers health sector reform recommendations for ten countries of Eastern Europe, drawn consistently from a set of explicit guiding principles. After discussing sector-specific characteristics, lessons of international experience, and the main set of initial conditions, the authors advocate reforms based on organized public financing for basic care, private financing for supplementary care, pluralistic delivery of services, and managed competition. Policymakers need to achieve a balance, both assuring social solidarity through universal access to basic health services and expanding individual choice and responsibility through voluntary supplemental insurance. The authors also consider the problems that undermine effectiveness of market-based competition in the health sector.

Download or read book Getting Better written by Owen Smith and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2013-06-10 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty years ago, health outcomes in the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia were not far behind those in Western Europe and well ahead of most other regions of the world. But progress since then has been slow. While life expectancy in the ECA region today is close to the global average, the gap with its western neighbors has doubled, and other middle-income regions have all surpassed ECA. Some countries in the region are doing better, but full convergence with the world’s most advanced health systems is still a long way off. At the same time, survey evidence suggests that the health sector is the top priority for additional investment among populations across the region. The experience of high-income countries also suggests that popular demand for strong and accessible health systems will only grow over time. Yet these aspirations must be reconciled with current fiscal realities. In brief, health sector issues are a challenge here to stay for policy-makers across the ECA region. This report draws on new evidence to explore the development challenge facing health sectors in ECA, and highlights three key agendas to help policy-makers seeking to achieve more rapid convergence with the world’s best performing health systems. The first is the health agenda, where the task is to strengthen public health and primary care interventions to help launch the “cardiovascular revolution” that has taken place in the West in recent decades. The second is the financing agenda, in which growing demand for medical care must be satisfied without imposing undue burden on households or government budgets. The third agenda relates to broader institutional arrangements. Here there are some key reform ingredients common to most advanced health systems that are still missing in many ECA countries. A common theme in each of these three agendas is the emphasis on improving outcomes, or “Getting Better”.

Download or read book The Efficiency of Post Communist Countries Health Systems written by Justyna Kujawska and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Health-care costs are a major financial burden for the transition economies, which have experienced rapidly increasing demand for health-care services. The former communist countries of the Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia needed to reform the financing of their health-care systems and make efforts to strengthen the role of primary care while limiting the role of hospital care. The growing health needs and, consequently, costs resulted in the increased attention paid to the performance of health systems. The aim of this chapter is to determine the efficiency of health systems in post-communist countries. The data envelopment analysis method was used. The effective health systems were identified and recommendations for the inefficient countries were formulated.

Download or read book Who is Paying for Health Care in Eastern Europe and Central Asia written by Maureen A. Lewis and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Informal payments in the health sector of Eastern and Central Asia are emerging as a fundamental aspect of health care financing and a serious impediment to health care reform. These informal payments, made to individuals or institutions in cash or in kind, are nearly always for services that are meant to be covered by the health care system. Such private payments to public personnel have created an informal market for health care , and are a form of corruption. This problem's roots are traced to declining revenues which have not coincided with a reduction in buildings, hospital beds and health personnel. In these circumstances informal payments compensate for lost earnings, and therefore reforms to modernise the region's health systems must compete with individuals' personal revenues. Options for addressing this problem include comprehensive anticorruption policies, downsizing of the public health system, reducing the set of services sibsidised by the state, encouraging cost sharing with those who can afford it, improving accountability, and promoting private alternatives.

Download or read book Innovations in Health Service Delivery written by Alexander S. Preker and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2003 with total page 646 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the largest expenditure category of the health systems in both industrialised and developing countries, hospital care provision has been the focus of reforms over recent decades. This publication reviews recent trends in hospital policy reforms and options around the world; and includes case studies which offer insights into lessons learned. Issues considered include: differences in income levels, cultural settings and market environments; organisational changes such as increased management autonomy and privatisation; the need for parallel reforms and effective evaluation mechanisms.

Download or read book Health Care In Central Asia written by Mckee and published by Open University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central Asia remains one of the least known parts of the former Soviet Union. The five central Asian republics gained their unexpected independence in 1991. They have faced enormous challenges over the last decade in reforming their health care systems, including adverse macro-economic conditions and political instability. To varying extents, each country is diverging from a hierarchical and unsustainable Soviet model health care system. Common strategies have involved devolving the ownership of health services, seeking sources of revenue additional to shrinking state taxes, 'down-sizing' their excessive hospital systems, introducing general practitioners into primary care services, and enhancing the training of health professionals. This book draws on a decade of experience of what has worked and what has not. It is an invaluable source for those working in the region and for others interested in the experiences of countries in political and economic transition.

Download or read book Governance of Hospitals in Central and Eastern Europe written by Przemyslaw Marcin Sowa and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-10-28 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a novel view of healthcare system transition in post-communist countries. It is the first region-wide comparative study of hospital governance in Eastern Europe. Comprehensive new material shows the evolution and significance of governance, complementing recent publications on the topic from industrialised countries. Throughout the book, governance is described and substantiated as a major component that, together with provider payment mechanisms, defines the hospital sector’s operations. This view subscribes to the economists’ growing appreciation of extra-financial aspects in the discussion of incentives and regulation of healthcare markets. In particular, the book explains how governance arrangements may affect the outcomes of healthcare financing reforms, and should thus be seen as a critical determinant of their success or failure. This new model of thinking about healthcare system transition emerges from an analysis of 22 countries over the course of two decades. While the primary focus of the study is on developing the hospital sector, an extensive background chapter provides a standalone introduction to the dynamically changing landscape of healthcare in Eastern Europe and an overview of the various problems and challenges the region is facing. Practitioners, policy-makers, academics and students interested in Eastern European healthcare systems, their origins, current status and ways forward, will appreciate the book’s reflections on the problem complexity, the clarity of its concepts, and its accessible style of presentation.

Download or read book Harnessing Quality for Global Competitiveness in Eastern Europe and Central Asia written by Jean-Louis Racine and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2011-05-05 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Standards are everywhere, yet go mostly unnoticed. They define how products, processes, and people interact, assessing these entities’ features and performance and signaling their level of quality and reliability. They can convey important benefits to trade, productivity, and technological progress and play an important role in the health and safety of individual consumers and the environment. Firms’ ability to produce competitive products depends on the availability of adequate quality-support services. A “national quality infrastructure” denotes the chain of public and private services (standardization, metrology, inspection, testing, certification, and accreditation) needed to ascertain that products and services introduced in the marketplace meet defined requirements, whether demanded by authorities or by consumers. In much of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, national quality infrastructure systems are underdeveloped and not harmonized with those of their trading partners. This imbalance increases trade costs, hinders local firms’ competitiveness, and weakens overall export performance. The objective of Harnessing Quality for Global Competitiveness in Eastern Europe and Central Asia is to highlight the need to reform and modernize the institutions in the region toward better quality and standards. The book ties in with much of the work done in the World Bank on the business environment, trade facilitation, economic diversification, and enterprise innovation. The countries in the region can improve this situation, revising mandatory standards, streamlining technical regulations, and harmonizing their national quality infrastructure with those of regional and international trade partners. Most governments will need to invest strategically in their national quality infrastructure, including pooling services with neighboring countries and stimulating local awareness and demand for quality. Specifically for the countries of the former Soviet Union, the restructuring process will need to improve governance, thus eliminating conflicts of interest and providing technically credible services to the economy.

Download or read book Understanding Hospitals in Changing Health Systems written by Antonio Durán and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-27 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This timely book provides insight into the changing role of the ‘hospital’ in the face of technological, organizational innovation and ever-tightening health budgets.”James Barlow, Imperial College Business School, UK “This book covers various relevant aspects of the hospital in different states and contexts. Underlining the importance of business models for future hospitals, this publication presents models of care from a historic and a current perspective. All authors possess a deep insight into different health care systems, not only as scholars but as experts working for world-renowned health policy institutions such as the World Health Organization, the World Bank or the European Observatory for Health Systems.”Siegfried Walch, Management Center Innsbruck, Austria “For an organisation like mine, representing those involved in the strategic planning of healthcare infrastructure, this book provides invaluable insights into what really matters – now and for the future – in the complex and contentious field of hospital development.”Jonathan Erskine, European Health Property Network, Netherlands This book seeks to reframe current policy discussions on hospitals. Healthcare services turn expensive economic resources—people, capital, pharmaceuticals, energy, materials—into care and cure. Hospitals concentrate the use and the cost of these resources, particularly highly-trained people, expensive capital, and embedded technologies. But other areas of health, such as public health and primary care, seem to attract more attention and affection, at least within the health policy community. How to make sense of this paradox? Hospitals choose, or are assigned, to deliver certain parts of care packages. They are organised to do this via “business models”. These necessarily incorporate models of care – the processes of dealing with patients. The activity needs to be governed, in the widest senses. Rational decisions need to be taken about both the care and the resources to be used. This book pulls these elements together, to stimulate a debate.

Download or read book Health Policy and European Union Enlargement written by Mckee and published by McGraw-Hill Education (UK). This book was released on 2004-04-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While there may be consensus on the broader issues of the core objectives of the health care system, expectations differ between EU countries, and European national policy-makers. This book seeks firstly to assess the impact of the enlargement process and then to analyse the challenges that lie ahead in the field of health and health policy.

Download or read book Transition Economies written by Aleksandr V. Gevorkyan and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary study offers a comprehensive analysis of the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Providing full historical context and drawing on a wide range of literature, this book explores the continuous economic and social transformation of the post-socialist world. While the future is yet to be determined, understanding the present phase of transformation is critical. The book's core exploration evolves along three pivots of competitive economic structure, institutional change, and social welfare. The main elements include analysis of the emergence of the socialist economic model; its adaptations through the twentieth century; discussion of the 1990s market transition reforms; post-2008 crisis development; and the social and economic diversity in the region today. With an appreciation for country specifics, the book also considers the urgent problems of social policy, poverty, income inequality, and labor migration. Transition Economieswill aid students, researchers and policy makers working on the problems of comparative economics, economic development, economic history, economic systems transition, international political economy, as well as specialists in post-Soviet and Central and Eastern European regional studies.

Download or read book Global Trends 2040 written by National Intelligence Council and published by Cosimo Reports. This book was released on 2021-03 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

Download or read book Healthcare Systems written by Jeffrey Braithwaite and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, we invited 146 authors with expertise in health policy, systems design, management, research, or practice, from each of the countries included, to consider health reforms or systems improvements in their country or region. The resulting case studies, of 52 individual countries and five regional groupings, cover 152 countries or territories, or three-quarters of the world’s nations. Each chapter author was asked to think 5–15 years into the future and make a prediction on how their health system could be strengthened as a result of the successful unfolding of their case study. The types of projects our authors have chosen to explicate into the future are wide-ranging. They vary from e-consultation services in Estonia, achieving universal health coverage in Argentina and Mexico, reforming long-term care in the Netherlands, reassessing care for the aging population and the frail elderly in Australia, streamlining the health system through Lean Thinking in Nigeria, using regulation to improve care in South Africa, developing a new accreditation model in Turkey, through to a critique of physician specialization in Russia and applying IT initiatives to improve care in China, Lebanon, Taiwan, Papua New Guinea, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela and Wales. Chapter writers recognized that the improvement work they were doing was part of a moving target. There was general agreement that the effective use of limited resources and overcoming hurdles and constraints were crucial to enhancing health systems in order to deliver better care over the medium term. While some initiatives required considerable funding, many were relatively inexpensive. These case studies demonstrate ways in which fruitful application of partnerships and creativity can make considerable gains in strengthening healthcare delivery systems. Features The third book in a series on international health reform Involves 146 contributing authors, five regional editors, a series editor and a highly skilled support team to explore sustainable improvement in health systems in the future Encompasses a time horizon of the next 5–15 years Covers 152 countries or territories, with 52 individual countries and an analysis of five regional groupings comprising 100 countries

Download or read book Income Support for the Poorest written by Emil Tesliuc and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2014-07 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study reviews the role and workings and the strengths and weaknesses of last-resort income support programs in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It suggests how they can be made more effective, what other countries can learn from them, and why they should have a bigger role in social protection in the region.

Download or read book Satisfaction with Life and Service Delivery in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union written by Salman Zaidi and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past two decades in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have been times of tremendous change, with countries undergoing rapid transformation from centrally-planned to market-oriented economies. While poverty increased during the initial years of transition, primarily on account of the sharp economic contraction, the resurgence of economic growth in the region since 1998 has resulted in a rebound in household incomes and living standards. Data from the 2006 Life in Transition Survey (LiTS) a joint initiative of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank provides a unique opportunity to investigate the extent to which citizens of ECA countries are satisfied with their lives and with the performances of their governments, and to study key factors influencing their outlook in a systematic way across all countries of the region. The main objective of the LiTS was to assess the impact of transition on people, covering four main themes. First, it collected personal information on aspects of material well-being, including household expenditures, possession of consumer goods such as a car or mobile phone, and access to local public services and utilities. Second, the survey included measures of satisfaction and attitudes towards economic and political reforms as well as public service delivery. Third, the LiTS captured individual 'histories' key events and episodes that may have influenced their attitudes towards reforms, and information on family background, employment, and coping strategies. Finally, the survey also attempted to capture the extent to which crime and corruption are affecting peoples' lives, and the extent to which individuals' trust in other people and in state institutions has changed over time.