Public Health And Beyond In Latin America And The Caribbean

Public Health and Beyond in Latin America and the Caribbean: Reflections from the Field explores the diverse and complex public health landscape, from global to regional to local, by considering historical and socio-cultural factors to contextualize the ongoing public health crisis. Drawing on four decades of field experience, research, and teaching, Sherri L. Porcelain uses case studies to offer a realistic view of the public heath struggle in Latin America and the Caribbean. Using specific countries as regional examples, the book shows how population health has been inextricably linked to political, economic, social, cultural, ethical, ecological, environmental, and technological factors. Chapters in this book will examine the history of public health issues associated with international development, globalization and the international political economy, disasters, diplomacy, and security studies coupled with the changing role of key actors driving the global and regional agendas. The final chapter examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and what it means for the future of public health. This book is recommended for undergraduate students interested in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean as well as others concerned with global and regional population health challenges.

This book provides a clear, broad, and provocative synthesis of the history of Latin American medicine.

'Beyond Survival' breaks new ground in the ongoing debate about health finance and financial protection from the costs of health care. The evidence and discussion support the need to consider financial protection, in addition to health status, as a policy objective when setting priorities for health systems. This book reviews the Latin American experience with health reform in the last 20 years and the fundamentals of health system financing, using new evidence to show the magnitude and mechanisms that determine the impoverishing effects of health events (diseases, accidents, and those of the life cycle). It provides options for policy makers on how to protect, and help household to protect themselves,against this impoverishment. The authors use empirical evidence from six case studies commissioned for this report, on Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, and Mexico. This book provides policy makers with a solid conceptual basis for decisions on the contents of mandatory health insurance benefit packages, choices of financing mechanisms, and the roles of public policy in this field. 'Beyond Survival' provides an in-depth analysis of, and organizational alternatives for, risk pooling and health insurance for financial protection. It analyzes the urgent need to extend risk pooling to the informal sector, the challenges for current social insurance arrangements, and options for policy makers to effectively extend risk pooling to the informal sector.

This second edition of Health at a Glance: Latin America and the Caribbean, prepared jointly by OECD and the World Bank, presents a set of key indicators of health status, determinants of health, healthcare resources and utilisation, healthcare expenditure and financing, quality of care, health workforce, and ageing across 33 Latin America and the Caribbean countries.

This book examines the health and economic impact of noncommunicable diseases in Latin America and the Caribbean and the governance challenges in designing and implementating multisectoral interventions to prevent these conditions, including policies to improve diet, increase physical activity, and reduce tobacco use and alcohol abuse.

Over the past three decades, many countries of Latin America and the Caribbean have recognized health as a human right. Since the early 2000s, 46 million more people in the countries studied are covered by health programs with explicit guarantees of affordable care. Reforms have been accompanied by a rise in public spending for health, financed largely from general revenues that prioritized or explicitly target the population without capacity to pay. Political commitment has generally translated into larger budgets as well as passage of legislation that ring-fenced funding for health. Most countries have prioritized cost-effective primary care and adopted purchasing methods that incentivize efficiency and accountability for results, and that give stewards of the health sector greater leverage to steer providers to deliver on public health priorities. Evidence from the analysis of 54 household surveys corroborates that investments in extending coverage are yielding results. Though the poor still have worse health outcomes than the rich, disparities have narrowed considerably - particularly in the early stage of the life course. Countries have reached high levels of coverage and equity in utilization of maternal and child health services; coverage of noncommunicable disease interventions is not as high and service utilization is still skewed toward the better off. Catastrophic health expenditures have declined in most countries; the picture regarding equity, however, is mixed. While the rate of impoverishment owing to health-care expenditures is low and generally declining, 2-4 million people in the countries studied still fall below the poverty line after health spending. Efforts to systematically monitor quality of care in the region are still in their infancy. Nonetheless, a review of the literature reveals important shortcomings in quality of care, as well as substantial differences across subsystems. Improving quality of care and ensuring sustainability of investments in health remain an unfinished agenda.

Conservation of biological diversity is important for sustainable development, and decentralization is a key aspect of good governance. Whether decentralization promotes conservation and if so, under what conditions, is the topic of this book. This study draws insights from field experience and traces the complex interactions among various factors involved, such as degree and type of decentralization, community participation, institutional capacity, and economic incentives. Local and international experts present case studies from experiences in Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, the Philippines, Russia, and Zimbabwe. Subsequent chapters review 32 World Bank and Global Environment Facility projects and their impact on habitat conservation, describe a possible model of a decentralized country, and look at lessons learned from the overall study.