The Queensland Health Royal Commissions

Utilisation of public inquiries and royal commissions in Westminster systems of government is a source of continuing interest. That royal commissions continue to be appointed when there is an increasing array of other institutions governments can now employ and given that royal commission reports often have very adverse impacts on the appointing governments, remains a key issue. So the appointment by the Queensland government of not one, but two royal commissions in 2005 into the same topic – the recruitment and performance of doctors recruited abroad working in Queensland public hospitals – provides a special opportunity to analyse the circumstances in which a royal commission mechanism is activated. That one of these royal commissions had to be disbanded because of legal action taken by several of those being investigated is another reason to assess these royal commissions. This is almost without precedent in Australia and has implications for the future conduct of such bodies. Lastly, how the Queensland government was able to minimise the blame from the subsequent royal commission's highly critical report, is also instructive and worthy of assessment .     

美国全球卫生安全战略及其对世界卫生安全体系的挑战

进入21世纪以来,新型冠状病毒、埃博拉、重症急性呼吸综合征以及甲流感等新发和复发传染病危机对全球卫生安全构成严重威胁,因此,如何促进全球卫生安全治理是当今国际社会亟待解决的问题。尽管美国曾经在全球卫生安全治理中发挥了重要作用,但尚未形成清晰的全球卫生安全治理政策。美国于2019年5月首次发布《全球卫生安全战略》,标志着特朗普政府全球卫生安全政策正式出台。该《全球卫生安全战略》以应对传染病威胁为核心,呈现出了以国家安全为导向和"全政府"路径的特点,充分体现了特朗普政府的"负担分担""美国优先"和反多边主义的思维。在全球卫生安全领域,各国已成为"因病相依"的全球命运共同体。有效的全球卫生安全治理需要全球多边主义,特朗普政府以国家安全为导向和以"美国优先"为原则的《全球卫生安全战略》与全球卫生安全的实现之间存在张力。特朗普政府的上述思维不仅侵蚀了全球卫生安全体系建构所必需的国际政治合作基础,也恶化了全球卫生安全的融资体系,因此对全球卫生安全体系构成了挑战。     

卫生执法人员现状分析及专业培养探讨

运用问卷调查和统计学方法,对卫生执法人员现状进行分析,显示存在学历层次偏低、专业结构不合理、接受卫生法律知识培训和教育不足、社会评价偏低等问题,认为卫生执法人员法律素质偏低是影响卫生执法效果的核心问题,需要建立专门的人才培养机制才能从根本上加以解决。     

Addressing avoidable vision impairment in Mozambique and the Africa region

The Mozambique Eyecare Project was an international partnership to implement and research eye health education in Mozambique and the Africa region. An optometry degree was developed at Universidade Lúrio, Mozambique. In addition, existing eye health workers were upskilled with training. Researchers from various disciplines evaluated the project and its potential for impact on eye health in the region. The body of evidence generated from the research provides useful lessons for development programmes in general, as well as specific lessons for delivering eye health education and service delivery models for low-income settings.     

Emotional Labor and Job Stress in Caring Professions: Exploring Universalism and Particularism in Construct and Culture

Passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in the US increases demand for nurses and brings health care into the public sphere with all that entails, including public accountability and performance measurement. In the UK’s long-standing national healthcare system, revelations of several years of neglect and poor oversight at one hospital might have contributed to nearly 1,200 deaths. The resulting Francis Report cited, among many factors, undue emphasis on reaching national access targets and balancing budgets for substandard care. Scholars of emotional labor note these trends with interest, because emotional labor is essential to nursing practice. But is emotional labor a universal construct, or is it particular to cultural context? How much can be imported from one study to the next? We compare nurse job stress in individualist and collectivist countries and reveal a statistically significant relationship: The higher a country’s individualism index, the greater the frequency of emotional-labor-demanding job stress.     

Recovering religion: practising intersectoral cooperation in a time of cholera

ABSTRACT

Due to social and historical forces resistant to predictions of religion’s waning influence in the modern world, responses to contemporary epidemics continue to involve local religious entities and global religious networks. This viewpoint draws on the history of the 1854 cholera epidemic in London to highlight how histories of cooperation between religion and public health can help focus current thinking about the potential for intersectoral cooperation in response to modern epidemics.     

Mobilising faith-based and lay leaders to address antenatal care outcomes in northern Ghana

ABSTRACT

Despite the benefits of antenatal care, evidence from sub-Saharan Africa suggests that women often initiate these services after the first trimester of pregnancy and do not complete the recommended number of visits. This study examines the impact of mobilising faith-based and lay leaders to address the socio-cultural barriers to antenatal care uptake in northern Ghana in the context of a broader child survival project. A quasi-experimental design was used, and data were analysed using a difference-in-differences approach. The results presented in this article indicate the potential for faith-based and lay leaders to promote uptake of maternal and child health behaviours.     

Models of engagement between the state and the faith sector in sub-Saharan Africa – a systematic review

ABSTRACT

In sub-Saharan Africa many individuals rely on non-state health providers, and engagement between state and non-state providers is increasingly common. Little analytic work has been done on the varied models of engagement, resulting in a lack of clarity about the promises and challenges of public–private engagement (PPE) for health. Despite their prevalence, PPEs often fail. Faith-based health providers (FBHPs) form a significant proportion of the non-state health sector in sub-Saharan Africa, and the number of partnerships with FBHPs is increasing. Building on a prior systematic review project that developed a typology of organisational models for PPE for health, this article reports on a secondary analysis, highlighting PPE initiatives with FBHPs.     

Labor History—Past,Present, and Future

ABSTRACT

While much recent literature has focused on the environmental cost of carbon fuels, these sources of energy generated large human costs in the work environment as well. Work in coal mines was famously dangerous. And while petroleum, gas extraction and refining were also risky, this paper demonstrates that they were far less dangerous than was coal, while energy productivity per worker was also higher in oil than coal. Relying in part on previously unexploited data, the paper also shows that on the eve of World War II, the human costs of energy – measured by fatalities per btu of output – were sharply less in oil and gas production than in coal mining. Thus the great twentieth century energy transition from coal to liquid and gaseous fuels reduced both the environmental and the workplace costs per unit of energy.     

政策利益相关者行为模式与规则的渐进调整——来自上海医疗卫生改革的经验

试图以上海医疗卫生改革政策制定和重构城市新型医疗服务体系为案例,对政策过程中利益相关者行为模式变化与政策规则调整的渐进主义特征做出解释.通过案例研究和制度分析的方法,本研究发现如何控制利益相关者的阻力行为以及强化决策者的预期信念,对于推动政策变迁的进程至关重要.上海市医疗卫生政策决策者是否能够进一步推进改革政策的进程在很大程度上不仅依赖于其对已有政策的效果(即相关者行为模式的变化与预期的方向相吻合或一致的限度),而且还取决于其对进一步改革政策下利益相关者行为模式变化的预期能力及其一致性的信念.