Health systems in lower income countries are often not able to provide for the basichealth needs of their populations. The progress of recent initiatives such as the WHO millennium development goals and new funds for disease programs is slowed by the limitations of these health service and...

Research and citizens have noted failures in coordinating health and social services and professionals, and the need to address this issue to realize benefits from increasing specialisation. Different methods have been proposed and one has been structural integration of separate services within...

Both public and private health and social care services are facing increased and changing demands to improve quality and reduce costs. To enable local services to respond to these demands, governments and other organisations have established large scale improvement programmes. These usually seek...

Objective To explore outsourcing of primary health care (PHC) services in four municipalities in Finland with varying amounts and types of outsourcing: a Southern municipality (SM) which contracted all PHC services to a not-for-profit voluntary organization, and Eastern (EM), South-Western (SWM)...