« Economics of Prevention: Developing a Framework for Policy Analysis | Main | TUS-CPS Users' Workshop »
May 25, 2009
How Healthy are Health Policies: Evaluating policies in health care, health care access and health care financing
Location: Maastricht, the Netherlands
Conference: 25-26 May 2009
The Maastricht Graduate School of Governance invites junior and senior researchers to participate in a research conference on
‘HOW HEALTHY ARE HEALTH POLICIES: Evaluating policies in health care, health care access and health care financing’
on Monday 25 and Tuesday 26 May 2009 in Maastricht, The Netherlands.
The PhD Programme in Public Policy and Policy Analysis (PPPA) trains young researchers in social protection and social policy in a European and multidisciplinary perspective. The programme finds it strengths in pooling the resources of top research institutes and universities in EU-countries.
The Research Conference will be held in Maastricht, the Netherlands. It brings together senior and junior researchers with diverse academic background to share ideas on the state of the art in health care policy development, including access to health care, financing both formally and out of pocket and labour market consequences.
We invite experts in the abovementioned fields, as well as people working in one the following area’s to present their recent research:
- Health care policies
Factors like: rising costs of health care, aging of the population, new medical technologies, and greater demand for health care have pushed countries to seek measures to increase the efficiency of their health care systems. During the last years, reforms in the European Health Care systems have been mainly driven by rising costs of health care, an aging population, and technological changes. The majority of these reforms attempts to revise: (1) health care financing mechanisms, and (2) health care provision arrangements. Among all countries, new measures are being implemented in order to reduce costs and increase efficiency. These measures include more market oriented health care mechanisms such as competition among providers. Reforms in Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, United Kingdom and elsewhere have seen the introduction of more market based health care. In general more attention is now being paid to getting the incentives right in order to improve the efficiency of health care provision. - Access to health care
The reports published as a result of the work of the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health shows that equality in access to medical services, especially in developing countries is one of the most important features of the health care system. The population’s health strongly depends on the possibility of getting appropriate health services when needed, which in turn related to the transparency of the health care system, patients empowerment in terms of information on available services and affordability of services. The aim of this session is to discuss each of above aspects of health care policy aimed at assuring access to medical services and presents results of the latest research in the field. - Health care financing
The financing of health care system is an important issue for all governments because: (1) health care is on of the main social service sectors in a country, (2) health care is generally not for profit, and (3) the social changes in the country directly impact the health care system, for example the aging of the population brings increased of costs to health care. All these reasons apply to health care financing all around the World. However, while the developed countries are concerned mostly with the best ways of governing the formalized arrangements between health care seekers and providers, in developing and transition countries the main issues relate to the extent of out of pocket payments, lack of insurance, and informal arrangements. Non insured health care episodes can influence the ability to work and earn incomes and also worsen the financial situation of households through out-of-pocket health expenditures. In many Eastern European and Post-Communist transition countries, where governance is relatively weak and health systems are not efficient, out-of-pocket health expenditures account for the major source for financing health care. - Health and the labour market
The labour market position, related to education and income of individuals, is one of the most important determinants of health. The question of how individual labour market activity impacts individual behaviour and health is especially important in times of economic crisis and increasing unemployment. Important questions arise, such as how changing labour market positions impact the population’s health in the long run. During the session, links between labour market performance and health outcomes in terms of mortality, morbidity and self-assessed health are discussed.
In addition, health status can have a clear impact on labour market positions. Disabled people, and people on sickness leave clearly have a special status in the labour market, and require specific policy instruments. But also less permanently inactive people, due to for instance maternity or parental leave may encounter certain responses in relation to their labour market position upon their return, such as a wage pay gap or disrupted career track.
For more information, please visit our website: http://www.governance.unimaas.nl/
