Health care policy seeks to ensure that citizens are protected against excessive out-of-pocket (OOP) expenses. Yet rising health care costs are pressuring private and social insurance schemes to shift toward more cost-sharing measures. This paper uses household surveys from seven countries to...

We estimate the causal effect of nurse turnover on mortality and the quality of nursing home care with a fixed effect instrumental variable estimation that uses the unemployment rate as an instrument for nursing turnover. We find that ignoring endogeneity leads to a systematic underestimation of...

The Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) has ambitious and laudable goals for universal health coverage, with a view to increasing health outcomes especially for the most vulnerable in society. It has set up the National Health Insurance Bureau, which covers nearly the entire population,...

The quality of care provided by health systems contributes towards efforts to reach sustainable development goal 3 on health and wellbeing. There is growing evidence that the impact of health interventions is undermined by poor quality of care in lower-income countries. Quality of care will also...

Objective: To analyse factors affecting variations in the observed quality of antenatal and sick-child care in primary-care facilities in seven African countries. Methods: We pooled nationally representative data from service provision assessment surveys of health facilities in Kenya, Malawi,...

Objective: To determine whether periodic supportive supervision after a training course improved the quality of paediatric hospital care in Kyrgyzstan, where inappropriate care was common but in-hospital postnatal mortality was low. Methods: In a cluster, randomized, parallel-group trial, 10...

Objective: To evaluate the quality of essential care during normal labour and childbirth in maternity facilities in Uttar Pradesh, India. Methods: Between 26 May and 8 July 2015, we used clinical observations to assess care provision for 275 mother-neonate pairs at 26 hospitals. Data on 42 items...