Health Reforms In South East Europe

Over the last two decades the countries of South East Europe have engaged in far-reaching reforms of their health systems. However, overviews of reform efforts in this part of Europe have been sorely lacking. This book addresses this shortage through the analysis of key aspects of health reforms and health workforce mobility in South East Europe.

The economic benefits to be gained from investment in public health are increasingly being recognised, as well as its importance for social cohesion, and these objectives play a central role in the European Union's Lisbon agenda. This study seeks to demonstrate the economic importance of the health sector for the countries of south-eastern Europe, by examining trends and patterns of disease burden and socioeconomic inequalities in health, the development of health systems and health policies, as well as options for policy development in order to meet future health challenges in the region.

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.

This book provides the first in-depth study of healthcare reforms in post-communist Eastern Europe. Combining insights from comparative politics and public policy analysis, it examines health reforms in Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Poland between 1989 and 2019. The book argues that the post-communist transformation of healthcare policy has entailed a process of policy learning, and that the countries' reform pathways were shaped by a series of initiatives aimed at applying market-oriented policy ideas in healthcare. The success of these initiatives has been influenced by three factors: policy legacies, political competition, and institutional configurations. The book offers a novel comparison of health reform in the region and policy changes more generally. It will appeal to scholars and students of public policy, health policy, and European politics.

This volume explores the central issues driving the present process of healthcare reform in Europe. 17 chapters written by scholars and policy makers from all parts of Europe draw together the available evidence from epidemiology and public health, economics, public policy, organizational behaviour and management theory as well as real world policy making experience, laying out the options that health sector decision-makers confront. Through its cross-disciplinary, cross-national approach, the book highlights the underlying trends that now influence health policy formulation across Europe. An authoritative introduction provides a broad synthesis of present trends and strategies in European health policy.

Analyses the experience with the financing reforms implemented by the countries of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, the Cauxasus and Central Asia.

Given dramatic changes in Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, local area experts were challenged to examine their national systems of health care, as well as proposals to reform them. Each chapter of this book provides contextual data and information on the empirical realities of a specific country at five-year intervals since 1990, as well as the organizational framework of its health care system. The book explores the historical thread of the reforms attempted and their current state of implementation by addressing criteria for reforming national health systems such as costs, effectiveness, efficiency, equity, and feasibility. The book stresses selected policy elements, such as the roles of major actors, the shadow economy, cost containment, access, centralization, and decentralization. While no blueprint is offered, intriguing patterns emerge across the cases, plus observations about 'next steps' in the unfolding process of health reforms in the region.

Rapid and profound change poses major challenges to health policy decisions in the countries of central and eastern Europe (CCEE). The analysis of the development of primary health care (PHC) in southern European countries, made in WHO meetings in recent years, can be useful to the CCEE. This meeting served to foster information exchanges between experts from the two groups of countries review the contents and achievement of previous fora, assess PHC and the health care reforms under way in the southern countries of the Region and establish their relevance to the CCEE.