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Bangladesh has an outdated healthcare system that has not changed since its independence in 1971. The aim of this paper is to look into how the Bangladesh healthcare system can be reformed.

This paper is literature‐based and a personal reflection on one country's health system.

Widespread dissatisfaction exists in the population and amongst doctors about healthcare delivery.

Major issues causing healthcare user dissatisfaction are discussed and recommendations for reform are suggested.

The paper provides an independent account of one country's healthcare policy and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and test a healthcare framework of service quality, perceived value, and satisfaction in Ghana. More specifically, this study investigates the role and effect of service quality on patient satisfaction and perceived value in Ghana’s healthcare delivery.

Data were gathered through surveys administered to 113 healthcare patients in Ghana. partial least square-structural equation modeling analysis was used to empirically test the research model.

Results show healthcare quality significantly influences satisfaction and perceived value of healthcare delivery. Additionally, perceived value’s impact on satisfaction and behavioral intention shows that increasing perceived benefits while reducing perceived costs leads to repeat behavior and paves the way for retention strategy for healthcare management.

This study yields a series of limitations in its results and conclusions. These limitations and future research are discussed in Section 7 of the study.

This study contributes to the literature by examining the effects of healthcare service quality on patient satisfaction and perceived value, determining the effect of healthcare service quality on patients’ behavioral intention, and testing the proposed framework in Ghana, a fast growing and economically liberalized emerging country in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The institutional conditions of primary care provision remain understudied in low- and middle-income countries. This study analyzes how primary care doctors cope with medical uncertainty in municipal clinics in urban India. As street-level bureaucrats, the municipal doctors occupy two roles simultaneously: medical professional and state agent. They operate under conditions that characterize health systems in low-resource contexts globally: inadequate state investment, weak regulation and low societal trust. The study investigates how, in these conditions, the doctors respond to clinical risk, specifically related to noncommunicable diseases (NCDs).

The analysis draws on year-long ethnographic fieldwork in Pune (2013–14), a city of three million, including 30 semi-structured interviews with municipal doctors.

Interpreting their municipal mandate to exclude NCDs and reasoning their medical expertise as insufficient to treat NCDs, the doctors routinely referred NCD cases. They expressed concerns about violence from patients, negative media attention and unsupportive municipal authorities should anything go wrong clinically.

The study contextualizes street-level service-delivery in weak institutional conditions. Whereas street-level workers may commonly standardize practices to reduce workload, here the doctors routinized NCD care to avoid the sociopolitical consequences of clinical uncertainty. Modalities of the welfare state and medical care in India – manifest in weak municipal capacity and healthcare regulation – appear to compel restraint in service-delivery. The analysis highlights how norms and social relations may shape primary care provision and quality.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of health expenditure at the household level in Nigeria with specific focus on the household and individual unique characteristics. It presents some stylised facts about the Nigerian health system and its financing options. It went further to show that household is the major financial organ of healthcare in Nigeria. The study aims to expand the domain of household health expenditure by analysing at national, urban and rural levels.

It adopted Engel curve approach, which was estimated using ordinary least squares technique. The model was structured to take care of life-cycle implications by examining effects of age in years and age groups (0-9, 10-19, 20-39, 40-59 and 60+) on healthcare spending. Data were drawn from the 2010 Harmonised Nigeria Living Standards Survey (HNLSS) conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics and analyses were conducted nationally, for urban and rural locations.

The result shows that individual characteristics like age, religion, education and household characteristics like income, size and headship commonly influence healthcare expenditure in Nigeria significantly. The household-level variables possess stronger significant effects among the rural households while marital status and employment had differential effects in both urban and rural locations. It also confirmed that Nigeria engages in intergenerational transfer of healthcare by the working population to the young and older generations.

HNLSS was only limited to those who were sick or injured in the last two weeks preceding the survey, leaving out those whose sickness preceded the two weeks before the survey. Also, the scope of health expenditure is limited to curative care spending that exclude expenses on preventive care, rehabilitative care as well as other cost-saving services.

This paper fulfils an identified need to examine the determinants of household health expenditure at the national, urban and rural locations.

Globally, safety in healthcare services has become an important focus. The Sultan Qaboos University Hospital (SQUH), located in the Sultanate of Oman in the Arabian Gulf, has begun to take active steps in delivering safer healthcare services while moving towards healthcare excellence. The purpose of this paper is to show the importance of prioritizing hospital‐wide safety and discuss how it has become essentially linked to the multi‐faceted dimension of quality through acceptability, efficiency accessibility and continuity in SQUH.

In an effort to shift all cultural elements of SQUH staff, system and activities towards addressing the goal of safety, SQUH has brought on a safety culture by holistic and systemic approach to quality improvement. Illustrated herein is the journey of how the hospital is addressing and measuring the goal of safety as an organizational priority through values, beliefs, goals, policies and operations.

The progressive steps that SQUH initiated since 2008 which measure, assess and ultimately change the perception of safety in the hospital are described. Specific recommendations include addressing safety culture elements of communicated values and objectives and measuring them, raising the awareness and training barriers, adopting safety goals specific to hospital environment, and centralizing a monitoring system to track input, progress and closure of safety mechanisms and activities.

The paper presents a model for improving safety in healthcare services through the initiatives of a university hospital, implementing a measureable phase approach over a two‐year period for addressing the goal of safety.

The control of particularly virulent communicable diseases such as COVID-19 can be considered a global public good. Unabated contagion, both within and across borders, can result in a global public bad. More effective control – such as by flattening the epidemiological curve – could prevent severe social and economic disruption by allowing domestic health and social protection systems to more adequately respond to the health crisis. This article elaborates on some of the main elements of counter COVID-19 responses, drawing on emerging international good practices. While a full evaluation of policy effectiveness is still forthcoming, it is critical to review and synthesize the emerging lessons and evidence even this early.

This article reviews the international good practices in counter COVID-19 responses across countries.

Concerted efforts across borders, such as by sharing data and collaborating in research and by coordinating international support for countercyclical economic and health responses at the national level, are some of the options for countering COVID-19 at the international level. Within countries, more inclusive social protection and health systems, combined with countercyclical economic policies, and concerted behavioral changes tend to produce more effective collective action against the spread of the disease.

This study is based on a review of emerging responses to the health crisis.

The policies and practices reviewed in this paper could feed into better-informed crisis responses to COVID-19 and other types of health shocks.

This study is among the first general reviews of policy responses to the COVID-19 health crisis.

This study provides new results on the efficiency on health centers in Madrid (Spain).

The objective of this study was to analyze the efficiency of primary care centers in the Community of Madrid in the period 2016–2018. Special attention has been paid to the detailed study of the best practices carried out. Likewise, the factors affecting efficiency have been analyzed. The methodologies used were nonparametric DEA radial, nonradial and bootstrap, for the estimation of efficiency. The main results reveal that, despite the differences in the techniques used, fundamentally the radial versus non-radial criterion, the results dynamically show the deterioration of the efficiency of the health Centers of the Community of Madrid, when compared by subperiods 2017/18–2016/17. The benchmark analysis identified the best practices of the health centers in the period analyzed. The application of cluster analysis, through kernel distributions (Azzalini and Menardi, 2014), segments the sample in two, and shows the top 20% of health Centers in resource management, in the case of radial DEA. Subsequently, a detailed analysis using pairwise comparison and their presence in the formation of the production frontier captures the benchmark health Centers, as they are present in the three years analyzed in the formation of the production frontier. The analysis of the second stage reports that the explanatory factors of efficiency are centered on the inverse relationship between the population assigned to the health Centers and positively with teaching versus those that do not. It also confirms the extent to which the pressure of care compromises the efficiency of the health Centers.

A methodological approach based on three efficiency analysis methodologies (radial, non-radial and bootstrap) is applied. Likewise, a cluster analysis criterion is used (Azzalini and Menardi, 2014), little explored in the field of Healthcare.

The Benchmark analysis applied in this study could contribute to decision making for managers, professionals, and policy makers in the health sector. The provision of a greater quantity and quality of public health resources is an important challenge that must be met in order to maintain levels of excellence.

This paper aims to present recently published resources on library instruction and information literacy, providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering various library types, study populations and research contexts.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations, reports and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2019.

The paper provides a brief description of all 370 sources and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians, researchers and anyone interested as a quick and comprehensive reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.