Reshaping Health Care In Latin America

Reshaping Health Care in Latin America: A Comparative Analysis of Health Care Reform in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico

Health Care Administration continues to be the definitive guide to contemporary health administration and is a must-have reference for students and professionals. This classic text provides comprehensive coverage of detailed functional, technical, and organizational matters.

Health practitioners working in gray zones, or between official and unofficial medicines, played a fundamental role in shaping Latin America from the colonial period onward. The Gray Zones of Medicine offers a human, relatable, complex examination of the history of health and healing in Latin America across five centuries. Contributors uncover how biographical narratives of individual actors--outside those of hegemonic biomedical knowledge, careers of successful doctors, public health initiatives, and research and medical institutions--can provide a unique window into larger social, cultural, political, and economic historical changes and continuities in the region. They reveal the power of such stories to illuminate intricacies and resilient features of the history of health and disease, and they demonstrate the importance of escaping analytical constraints posed by binary frameworks of legality/illegality, learned/popular, and orthodoxy/heterodoxy when writing about the past. Through an accessible and story-like format, this book unlocks the potential of historical narratives of healings to understand and give nuance to processes too frequently articulated through intellectual medical histories or the lenses of empires, nation-states, and their institutions.

Second in a series of publications from the Institute of Medicine's Quality of Health Care in America project Today's health care providers have more research findings and more technology available to them than ever before. Yet recent reports have raised serious doubts about the quality of health care in America. Crossing the Quality Chasm makes an urgent call for fundamental change to close the quality gap. This book recommends a sweeping redesign of the American health care system and provides overarching principles for specific direction for policymakers, health care leaders, clinicians, regulators, purchasers, and others. In this comprehensive volume the committee offers: A set of performance expectations for the 21st century health care system. A set of 10 new rules to guide patient-clinician relationships. A suggested organizing framework to better align the incentives inherent in payment and accountability with improvements in quality. Key steps to promote evidence-based practice and strengthen clinical information systems. Analyzing health care organizations as complex systems, Crossing the Quality Chasm also documents the causes of the quality gap, identifies current practices that impede quality care, and explores how systems approaches can be used to implement change.

This book examines issues concerning how developing countries will have to prepare for demographic and epidemiologic change. Much of the current literature focuses on the prevalence of specific diseases and their economic consequences, but a need exists to consider the consequences of the epidemiological transition: the change in mortality patterns from infectious and parasitic diseases to chronic and degenerative ones. Among the topics covered are the association between the health of children and adults, the strong orientation of many international health organizations toward infant and child health, and how the public and private sectors will need to address and confront the large-scale shifts in disease and demographic characteristics of populations in developing countries.

Health Care Administration: Managing Organized Delivery Systems, Fifth Edition provides graduate and pre-professional students with a comprehensive, detailed overview of the numerous facets of the modern healthcare system, focusing on functions and operations at both the corporate and hospital level. The Fifth Edition of this authoritative text comprises several new subjects, including new chapters on patient safety and ambulatory care center design and planning. Other updated topics include healthcare information systems, management of nursing systems, labor and employment law, and financial management, as well discussions on current healthcare policy in the United States. Health Care Administration: Managing Organized Delivery Systems, Fifth Edition continues to be one of the most effective teaching texts in the field, addressing operational, technical and organizational matters along with the day-to-day responsibilities of hospital administrators. Broad in scope, this essential text has now evolved to offer the most up-to-date, comprehensive treatment of the organizational functions of today's complex and ever-changing healthcare delivery system.

On either side of the globe, poor people often do not have access to the health services they need. Improvements in health care systems in Asia have lagged behind economic development, and progress in expanding health coverage in Latin America has been skewed across income levels. Health Services in Latin America and Asia takes a close look at how countries in both regions provide health care services, including the strategies that work and the problems that persist. The book documents encouraging progress in Bolivia, Brazil, China and Vietnam, and important preventive care programs in Central America and Thailand. It also examines health services in Chile, Colombia, the Philippines and Malaysia, as well as the health system and insurance model in Japan.Even though public and preventive health require specific and sustained allocations, both regions continue to use health insurance and other supply mechanisms to expand health service coverage. The book recommends broadening the supply of services through family doctors and community health workers, an alternative approach that would likely improve the equity, efficiency and sustainability of services.

Why do some societies fare well, and others poorly, at reducing the risk of early death? Wealth, Health, and Democracy in East Asia and Latin America finds that the public provision of basic health care and other inexpensive social services has reduced mortality rapidly even in tough economic circumstances, and that political democracy has contributed to the provision and utilization of such social services, in a wider range of ways than is sometimes recognized. These conclusions are based on case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand, as well as on cross-national comparisons involving these cases and others.