Explore the vast range of titles available.

Monitoring health inequality is a practice that fosters accountability and continuous improvement within health systems. The cycle of health inequality monitoring helps to identify and track health differences between subgroups providing evidence and feedback to strengthen equity-oriented policies programmes and practices. Through inequality monitoring and the use of disaggregated data countries gain insight into how health is distributed in the population looking beyond what is indicated by national averages. Data about health inequalities underlie health interventions that aim to reach vulnerable populations. Furthermore they constitute an evidence base to inform and promote equity-oriented health initiatives including the movement towards equitable universal health coverage. _x000D__x000D_ _x000D__x000D_ This Handbook is a user-friendly resource developed to help countries establish and strengthen health inequality monitoring practices. The handbook elaborates on the steps of health inequality monitoring including selecting relevant health indicators and equity stratifiers obtaining data analysing data reporting results and implementing changes. Throughout the handbook examples from low- and middle-income countries are presented to illustrate how concepts are relevant and applied in real-world situations; informative text boxes provide the context to better understand the complexities of the subject. The final section of the handbook presents an expanded example of national-level health inequality monitoring of reproductive maternal and child health. _x000D__x000D_.

Half the world's people currently live in rural and remote areas. The problem is that most health workers live and work in cities. This imbalance is common to almost all countries and poses a major challenge to the nationwide provision of health services. Its impact, however, is most severe in low income countries. There are two reasons for this. One is that many of these countries already suffer from acute shortages of health workers - in all areas. The other is that the proportion of the population living in rural regions tends to be greater in poorer countries than in rich ones. The World Health Organization (WHO) has therefore drawn up a comprehensive set of strategies to help countries encourage health workers to live and work in remote and rural areas. These include refining the ways students are selected and educated, as well as creating better working and living conditions. The first step has been to establish what works, through a year-long process that has involved a wide range of experts from all regions of the world. The second is to share the results with those who need them, via the guidelines contained in this document. The third will be to implement them, and to monitor and evaluate progress, and - critically - to act on the findings of that monitoring and evaluation. The guidelines are a practical tool that all countries can use. As such, they complement the WHO Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel, adopted by the Sixty-third World Health Assembly in May 2010. The Code offers a framework to manage international migration over the medium to longer term. The guidelines are a tool that can be used straight away to address one of the first triggers to internal and international migration - dissatisfaction with living and working conditions in rural areas. Together, the code of practice and these new guidelines provide countries with instruments to improve workforce distribution and enhance health services. Doing so will address a long-standing problem, contribute to more equitable access to health care, and boost prospects for improving maternal and child health and combating diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

This book was commissioned by the Department of Ethics, Equity, Trade and Human Rights as part of the work undertaken by the Priority Public Health Conditions Knowledge Network of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health, in collaboration with 16 of the major public health programs of WHO: alcohol-related disorders, cardiovascular diseases, child health, diabetes, food safety, HIV/AIDS, maternal health, malaria, mental health, neglected tropical diseases, nutrition, oral health, sexual and reproductive health, tobacco and health, tuberculosis, and violence and injuries. In addition to this, through collaboration with the Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, and the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, 13 case studies were commissioned to examine the implementation challenges in addressing social determinants of health in low-and middle-income settings. The Priority Public Health Conditions Knowledge Network has analyzed the impact of social determinants on specific health conditions, identified possible entry-points, and explored possible interventions to improve health equity by addressing social determinants of health.

In this book by the award-winning author of Just Healthcare, Norman Daniels develops a comprehensive theory of justice for health that answers three key questions: what is the special moral importance of health? When are health inequalities unjust? How can we meet health needs fairly when we cannot meet them all? Daniels' theory has implications for national and global health policy: can we meet health needs fairly in ageing societies? Or protect health in the workplace while respecting individual liberty? Or meet professional obligations and obligations of justice without conflict? When is an effort to reduce health disparities, or to set priorities in realising a human right to health, fair? What do richer, healthier societies owe poorer, sicker societies? Just Health: Meeting Health Needs Fairly explores the many ways that social justice is good for the health of populations in developed and developing countries.

Introduces a vision for the future of health equity and explains practical policy measures for how to achieve it. Health inequity is one of the defining problems of our time. But current efforts to address the problem focus on mitigating the harms of injustice rather than confronting injustice itself. In Equal Care, Seth A. Berkowitz, MD, MPH, offers an innovative vision for the future of health equity by examining the social mechanisms that link injustice to poor health. He also presents practical policies designed to create a system of social relations that ensures equal care for everyone. As Berkowitz illustrates, the project of social democracy works to improve health by bringing relationships of equality to the sites of human cooperation: in civil society, in political processes, and in economic activities. This book synthesizes three elements necessary for such a project—normative justification, mechanistic knowledge, and technical proficiency—into a practical vision of how to create health equity. Drawing from the fields of medicine, social epidemiology, sociology, economics, political science, philosophy, and more, Berkowitz makes clear that health inequity is social failure embodied, and the only true cures are political. Equal Care is essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of health equity.

Cholera, although it can kill an adult through dehydration in half a day, is easily treated. Yet in 1992-93, some five hundred people died from cholera in the Orinoco Delta of eastern Venezuela. In some communities, a third of the adults died in a single night, as anthropologist Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health physician, reveal in their frontline report. Why, they ask in this moving and thought-provoking account, did so many die near the end of the twentieth century from a bacterial infection associated with the premodern past? It was evident that the number of deaths resulted not only from inadequacies in medical services but also from the failure of public health officials to inform residents that cholera was likely to arrive. Less evident were the ways that scientists, officials, and politicians connected representations of infectious diseases with images of social inequality. In Venezuela, cholera was racialized as officials used anthropological notions of \"culture\" in deflecting blame away from their institutions and onto the victims themselves. The disease, the space of the Orinoco Delta, and the \"indigenous ethnic group\" who suffered cholera all came to seem somehow synonymous. One of the major threats to people's health worldwide is this deadly cycle of passing the blame. Carefully documenting how stigma, stories, and statistics circulate across borders, this first-rate ethnography demonstrates that the process undermines all the efforts of physicians and public health officials and at the same time contributes catastrophically to epidemics not only of cholera but also of tuberculosis, malaria, AIDS, and other killers. The authors have harnessed their own outrage over what took place during the epidemic and its aftermath in order to make clear the political and human stakes involved in the circulation of narratives, resources, and germs.

A guide to a holistic approach to healthcare measurement aimed at improving access and outcomes Healthcare System Access is an important resource that bridges two areas of research—access modeling and healthcare system engineering. The book's mathematical modeling approach highlights fundamental approaches on measurement of and inference on healthcare access. This mathematical modeling facilitates translating data into knowledge in order to make data-driven estimates and projections about parameters, patterns, and trends in the system. The complementary engineering approach uses estimates and projections about the system to better inform efforts to design systems that will yield better outcomes. The author—a noted expert on the topic—offers an in-depth exploration of the concepts of systematic disparities, reviews measures for systematic disparities, and presents a statistical framework for making inference on disparities with application to disparities in access. The book also includes information health outcomes in the context of prevention and chronic disease management. In addition, this text: * Integrates data and knowledge from various fields to provide a framework for decision making in transforming access to healthcare * Provides in-depth material including illustrations of how to use state-of-art methodology, large data sources, and research from various fields * Includes end-of-chapter case studies for applying concepts to real-world conditions Written for health systems engineers, Healthcare System Access: Measurement, Inference, and Intervention puts the focus on approaches to measure healthcare access and addresses important enablers of such change in healthcare towards improving access and outcomes.

Using spatial modeling techniques, we highlight disparities in access to monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) used to treat COVID-19 patients. Fifteen million individuals in the United States must travel over 30 min to access mAbs. Areas with lower COVID-19 vaccination rates have worse access to essential COVID-19 therapeutics.

In the United States, health among racial and ethnic minorities, as well as poor people, is significantly worse than the overall U.S. population. Health disparities are reflected by indices such as excess mortality and morbidity and shorter life expectancy. Examining the Health Disparities Research Plan of the National Institutes of Health is an assessment of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Strategic Research Plan and Budget to Reduce and Ultimately Eliminate Health Disparities. It focuses on practical solutions to remedy the state of the current health disparity crisis. The NIH has played the leading role in conducting extensive research on minority health and health disparities for more than two decades. Although additional research is critical to facilitating a better understanding of the overarching social, economic, educational, and environmental factors that predispose groups to specific diseases and conditions, there is also a great need to translate the existing and new information into best care practices. This means increasing communication with affected populations and their communities. Examining the Health Disparities Research Plan of the National Institutes of Health presents solutions to improving the health disparities nationwide and evaluates the NIH strategy plan designed to actively correct and combat the ongoing health disparities dilemma.

Around 20% of couples worldwide are affected by infertility issues, with numbers in the European Union reaching as high as 25%, while access to reproductive care varies significantly by geopolitical and country-specific variables. The purpose of this research is to shed light on the unique social, psychological, and financial difficulties faced by Romanian couples seeking access to assisted reproductive therapy (ART). A cross-sectional study was conducted between 2017 and 2019 to involve women who accessed ART at fertility clinics in Romania by completing two infertility surveys. We analyzed the data in terms of all facets of infertility and ART, including the effect of personal background and stress levels on succeeding to conceive, the impact of treatment costs, and household income. A total of 829 participants completed the survey. We observed that high stress exposure leads to a substantially higher duration to conceive using ART, although the proportions of successful pregnancies did not differ between low-stress and high-stress groups. A significantly higher number of couples achieved pregnancy when their monthly household income was higher than EUR 1000 and if the ART method was more expensive. Additionally, we observed that advanced age, high stress levels, and the high cost of ART had a negative association with achieving pregnancy using ART. The findings indicated that Romanian couples experiencing infertility must contend with significant expenses for specialist infertility treatments, as well as treatment-related stress, both of which have a detrimental effect on their odds of attaining conception.