Entertaining, provocative, lively, well-written text, which is must read for people who are passionate to drive change in health care.• Well- researched book on health care reforms that captures wealth of insights, serving as comprehensive source of up-to-date information and facts• Offers interesting insights into the health of India''s population and makes a passionate appeal for political priority to be given to universal health coverage and for an upstream pre-emptive approach to health • Contains thought provoking ideas and reform proposals, which are of global relevance• Must read for everyone interested in the Health Care System of India

This book offers a global perspective on healthcare reform and its relationship with efforts to improve quality and safety. It looks at the ways reforms have developed in 30 countries, and specifically the impact national reform initiatives have had on the quality and safety of care. It explores how reforms drive quality and safety improvement, and equally how they act to negate such goals. Every country included in this book is involved in a reform and improvement process, but each takes place in a particular social, cultural, economic and developmental context, leading to differing emphases and varied progress. Methods for tackling common problems - financing, efficiencies, effectiveness, evidence-based practice, institutional reforms, quality improvement, and patient safety initiatives - also differ. Representatives from each nation provide a chapter to convey their own situation. The editors draw a conclusion from these numerous contributions and synthesize the themes emerging into a coherent ‘lessons learned’ summary that delivers value to the numerous stakeholders. Healthcare Reform, Quality and Safety forms a compendium of the current ‘state of the art’ in global healthcare reform. This is the first book of its type, and offers a unique opportunity for cross-fertilization of ideas to the mutual benefit of countries involved in the project. The content will be of interest to governments, policymakers, managers and leaders, clinicians, teaching academics, researchers and students.

This book presents the health reform experiences over the past three decades of twelve small and medium-sized nations that are not often included in international comparative studies in this field. The major conclusion of the study is that despite many similarities in policy goals, policy challenges and in the menu of policy options for countries that seek to offer universal coverage to their population, the health reforms of the nations in this book did not converge into one direction or model. However, we found several widespread policy experiences that are relevant for others, too.For example, user fees are unpopular everywhere. Governments often try to soften the consequences by exempting large groups of users, thus largely defeating the very purpose of those fees.As a second example, the introduction of new payment modes for medical care — like the shift from fee for service to case-based payment — took much longer than originally expected everywhere, and also failed to deliver their promises of improved transparency or efficiency gains A third example is that proposals are for universal coverage often ignore the challenges of implementing new financing models that elsewhere took decades if not centuries to develop.The conclusions contain both empirical findings and theoretical conclusions of interest to policy-makers and scholars of international comparison. It is accessible for academics, healthcare managers and students as well as a wider audience of readers interested in the changes in healthcare across the world.

Reforms and Economic Transformation in India is the second volume in the series Studies in Indian Economic Policies. The first volume, India's Reforms: How They Produced Inclusive Growth (OUP, 2012), systematically demonstrated that reforms-led growth in India led to reduced poverty among all social groups. They also led to shifts in attitudes whereby citizens overwhelmingly acknowledge the benefits that accelerated growth has brought them and as voters, they now reward the governments that deliver superior economic outcomes and punish those that fail to do so. This latest volume takes as its starting point the fact that while reforms have undoubtedly delivered in terms of poverty reduction and associated social objectives, the impact has not been as substantial as seen in other reform-oriented economies such as South Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s, and more recently, in China. The overarching hypothesis of the volume is that the smaller reduction in poverty has been the result of slower transformation of the economy from a primarily agrarian to a modern, industrial one. Even as the GDP share of agriculture has seen rapid decline, its employment share has declined very gradually. More than half of the workforce in India still remains in agriculture. In addition, non-farm workers are overwhelmingly in the informal sector. Against this background, the nine original essays by eminent economists pursue three broad themes using firm level data in both industry and services. The papers in part I ask why the transformation in India has been slow in terms of the movement of workers out of agriculture, into industry and services, and from informal to formal employment. They address what India needs to do to speed up this transformation. They specifically show that severe labor-market distortions and policy bias against large firms has been a key factor behind the slow transformation. The papers in part II analyze the transformation that reforms have brought about within and across enterprises. For example, they investigate the impact of privatization on enterprise profitability. Part III addresses the manner in which the reforms have helped promote social transformation. Here the papers analyze the impact the reforms have had on the fortunes of the socially disadvantaged groups in terms of wage and education outcomes and as entrepreneurs.

This volume provides a comprehensive review of China's healthcare system and policy reforms in the context of the global economy. Following a value-chain framework, the 16 chapters cover the payers, the providers, and the producers (manufacturers) in China's system. It also provides a detailed analysis of the historical development of China's healthcare system, the current state of its broad reforms, and the uneasy balance between China's market-driven approach and governmental regulation. Most importantly, it devotes considerable attention to the major problems confronting China, including chronic illness, public health, and long-term care and economic security for the elderly. Burns and Liu have assembled the latest research from leading health economists and political scientists, as well as senior public health officials and corporate executives, making this book an essential read for industry professionals, policymakers, researchers, and students studying comparative health systems across the world.

This book presents the first comprehensive review of all major government-supported health insurance schemes in India and their potential for contributing to the achievement of universal coverage in India are discussed.

Equity and Access attempts to unravel the complex narrative of why inequities in the health sector are growing and access to basic health care is worsening, and the underlying forces that contribute to this situation. It draws attention to the way globalization has influenced India’s development trajectory as healthcare issues have assumed significant socio-economic and political significance in contemporary India. The volume explains how state and market forces have progressively heightened the iniquitous health care system and the process through which substantial burden of meeting health care needs has fallen on the individual households. Twenty-eight scholars comprising social scientists, medical experts, public health experts, policy makers, health activists, legal experts, and gender specialists have delved into the politics of access for different classes, castes, gender, and other categories to contribute to a new field ‘health care studies’ in this volume. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach within a broader political-economy framework, the volume is useful for understanding power relations within social groups and complex organizational systems.