Healthcare Policy and Governance in International Perspective

Abstract

Healthcare is one of modern society's most dynamic policy arenas. While the healthcare sector faces many challenges, it is also active in creating innova-tive models of governing institutions, professionals, and services in response to public demands. Heightened pressures for action, such as the global economic crisis and austerity politics, demographic changes, and persisting inequity, resulting in broadly similar approaches to reform, have increased interest in international, transnational, and global health policy. This, in turn, has fostered comparative research. New approaches to healthcare that develop in response to similar pressures concerning costs, quality, and access may create diverse and even contradictory results in different parts of the world. These changes call for careful empir-ical investigation and for a systems approach that brings the complexity of changing healthcare governance into perspective. This edited collection takes a critical and reflective approach on contemporary healthcare policies that all too often do not adequately respond to local needs and conditions, and that neglect issues of health equity, gender, and diversity, thereby reinforcing the inequality gaps. This Handbook is distinctive in its focus on the intricate interconnections between healthcare policy and governance, international comparison and global policy, global and local perspectives, and macro-, meso-, and micro-level policy approaches. This work comprises a multi-level governance approach on a wide range of 'hot button topics', such as the responses to economic pressures and demand for universal healthcare coverage in different regions of the globe, the shortage of health human resources, new models of hospital governance, leadership and 'hybridization' of management and medicine, long-term care policies, e-Health, as well as equity in healthcare policy and governance, and more general challenges of ethics and solidarity in healthcare policy.