Effective coverage is a measure of health system performance that combines three aspects of health care service delivery into a single measure: need, use, and quality. In this technical note, the concept of effective coverage is explained, methodological issues are discussed and the implications...

This paper presents some of the background research that contributed to the discussions within the Inter-American Development Bank's policy and strategy regarding indigenous health issues. The paper's conceptual approach and good practice research helped focus the discussion on the importance of...

This role of faith-inspired health care providers in sub-saharan Africa and public-private partnerships is comprised of a three volume series on strengthening the evidence for faith inspired engagement in health in sub-Saharan Africa. An increasing level of interest in the role of faith in...

What factors affect health care delivery in the developing world? Anecdotal evidence of lives cut tragically short and the loss of productivity due to avoidable diseases is an area of salient concern in global health and international development. This working paper looks at factual evidence to...

In Tanzania, as in many other low income countries, health care is largely obtained through out-of pocket payment. The current liberalised health care market displays a pattern of exclusion, impoverishment, abuse and poor quality care alongside substantial patches of accessibility and probity,...

This paper proposes a new approach to the measurement of inequality and inequity in the delivery of health care based on recent contributions to the literature of poverty and deprivation. This approach has some appealing characteristics that enlarge the scope of inequity analysis: 1) the measure...

Using individual patient level hospital utilisation data for 2003, we examine the decisions of Dutch patients to bypass the nearest hospital for orthopaedics and neurosurgery. During our sample period, health insurers did not steer patients to preferred hospitals and performance indicators were...

The objective of the paper is to identify the determinants of access to health care in rural Russia. We started out with the observation that the transition process has affected the provision of social services in the Russian Federation in general, and in rural areas in particular, owing to the...

In this paper we discuss health care provision in developing countries within a two-track framework of public-private cooperation. China is presented as a case study to illustrate the difficulties facing a developing country that adopts a market-driven health care strategy in the context of...

There is an urgent need to reassess the arguments used in favour of scaling-up private-sector provision in poor countries. The evidence shows that prioritising this approach is extremely unlikely to deliver health for poor people. Governments and rich country donors must strengthen state...