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Biomedical subjects

Jean-Pierre Unger

Publications and source records attributed to Jean-Pierre Unger.

12 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Disintegrated care: the Achilles heel of international health policies in low and middle-income countries.

PURPOSE: To review the evidence basis of international aid and health policy. CONTEXT OF CASE: Current international aid policy is largely neoliberal in its promotion of commoditization and privatisation. We review this policy's responsibility for the lack of effectiveness in disease control and poor access to care in low and middle-income countries. DATA SOURCES: National policies, international programmes and pilot experiments are examined in both scientific and grey literature. CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION: We document how health care privatisation has led to the pool of patients being cut off from public disease control interventions--causing health care disintegration--which in turn resulted in substandard performance of disease control. Privatisation of health care also resulted in poor access. Our analysis consists of three steps. Pilot local contracting-out experiments are scrutinized; national health care records of Colombia and Chile, two countries having adopted contracting-out as a basis for health care delivery, are critically examined against Costa Rica; and specific failure mechanisms of the policy in low and middle-income countries are explored. We conclude by arguing that the negative impact of neoliberal health policy on disease control and health care in low and middle-income countries justifies an alternative aid policy to improve both disease control and health care.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2006

Integrated care: a fresh perspective for international health policies in low and middle-income countries.

PURPOSE: To propose a social-and-democrat health policy alternative to the current neoliberal one. CONTEXT OF CASE: The general failure of neoliberal health policies in low and middle-income countries justifies the design of an alternative to bring disease control and health care back in step with ethical principles and desired outcomes. DATA SOURCES: National policies, international programmes and pilot experiments--including those led by the authors--are examined in both scientific and grey literature. CASE DESCRIPTION: We call for the promotion of a publicly-oriented health sector as a cornerstone of such alternative policy. We define 'publicly-oriented' as opposed to 'private-for-profit' in terms of objectives and commitment, not of ownership. We classify development strategies for such a sector according to an organisation-based typology of health systems defined by Mintzberg. As such, strategies are adapted to three types of health systems: machine bureaucracies, professional bureaucracies and divisionalized forms. We describe avenues for family and community health and for hospital care. We stress social control at the peripheral level to increase accountability and responsiveness. Community-based, national and international sources are required to provide viable financing. CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION: Our proposed social-and-democrat health policy calls for networking, lobbying and training as a joint effort in which committed health professionals can lead the way.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2006

Can malaria be controlled where basic health services are not used?

OBJECTIVE: To assess the potential of integrating malaria control interventions in underused health services. METHODS: Using the Piot predictive model, we estimated malaria cure rates by deriving parameters influencing treatment at home and in health facilities from the best-performing African malaria programmes and applying them to Yanfolila district, Mali. RESULTS: Without any malaria control intervention, the population cure rate is 8.4% with home treatment, but would be 13% if access to timely treatment were improved (as in Kenya). A further 3.2% of malaria patients could be cured in institutional settings with more sensitive diagnosis, timely start of treatment, better compliance (as in Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana) and 80% chloroquine efficacy. Applied in a setting where 7.6% of malaria patients seek institutional care, these assumptions would result in a total population cure rate of 14.5%. Increasing the health service user rate from 0.17 in Yanfolila to 0.95 new cases/inhabitant/year (as in Namibia) would result in half of all malaria patients attending professional services, raising the cure rate to 26.1%. CONCLUSION: If malaria patients are to be treated and followed-up early and appropriately, basic health services need to deliver integrated care and be attended by an adequate pool of users. Improved service user rates and case management can increase malaria cure rates far more than isolated control interventions can. This has implications for international policies endorsing a narrow disease-based approach.

Africa↗
PubMed2005

Colombia: in vivo test of health sector privatization in the developing world.

The reform of the Colombian health sector in 1993 was founded on the internationally advocated paradigm of privatization of health care delivery. Taking into account the lack of empirical evidence for the applicability of this concept to developing countries and the documented experience of failures in other countries, Colombia tried to overcome these problems by a theoretically sound, although complicated, model. Some ten years after the implementation of "Law 100," a review of the literature shows that the proposed goals of universal coverage and equitable access to high-quality care have not been reached. Despite an explosion in costs and a considerable increase in public and private health expenditure, more than 40 percent of the population is still not covered by health insurance, and access to health care proves uncreasingly difficult. Furthermore, key health indicators and disease control programs have deteriorated. These findings confirm the results in other middle- and low-income countries. The authors suggest the explanation lies in the inefficiency of contracting-out, the weak economic, technical, and political capacity of the Colombian government for regulation and control, and the absence of real participation of the poor in decision-making on (health) policies.

Colombia↗
PubMed2004

Interface flow process audit: using the patient's career as a tracer of quality of care and of system organisation.

OBJECTIVES: This case study aims to demonstrate the method's feasibility and capacity to improve quality of care. Several drawbacks attached to tracer condition and selected procedure audits oblige clinicians to rely on external evaluators. Interface flow process audit is an alternative method, which also favours integration of health care across institutions divide. METHODS: An action research study was carried out to test the feasibility of interface flow process audit and its impact on quality improvement. An anonymous questionnaire was carried out to assess the participants' perception of the process. RESULTS: In this study, interface flow process audit brought together general practitioners and hospital doctors to analyse the co-ordination of their activities across the primary-secondary interface. Human factors and organisational characteristics had a clear influence on implementation of the solutions. In general, the participants confirmed that the interface flow process audit helped them to analyse the quality of case management both at primary and secondary care level. CONCLUSIONS: The interface flow process audit appears a useful method for regular in-service self-evaluation. Its practice enabled to address a wide scope of clinical, managerial and economical problems. Bridging the primary-secondary care gap, interface flow process audit's focus on the patient's career combined with the broad scope of problems that can be analysed are particularly powerful features. The methodology would benefit from an evaluation of its practice on larger scale.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2002

A plea for an initiative to strengthen family medicine in public health care services of developing countries.

An analysis of standards for the best practice of family medicine in Northern European countries provides a framework for identifying the difficulties and deficiencies in the health services of developing countries, and offers strategies and criteria for improving primary health care practice. Besides well-documented socioeconomic and political problems, poor quality of care is an important factor in the weaknesses of health services. In particular, a patient-centered perspective in primary care practice is barely reflected in the medical curriculum of developing countries. Instead, public sector general practitioners are required to concentrate on preventive programs that tackle a few well-defined diseases and that tend to be dominated by quantitative objectives, at the expense of individually tailored prevention and treatment. Reasons for this include training oriented to hospital medicine and aspects of GPs' social status and health care organization that have undermined motivation and restricted change. A range of strategies is urgently required, including training to improve both clinical skills and aspects of the doctor-patient interaction. More effective government health policies are also needed. Co-operation agencies can contribute by granting political protection to public health centers and working to orient the care delivered at this level toward patient-centered medicine.

Benchmarking↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Quality standards for health care delivery and management in publicly oriented health services.

In 1999, the multidisciplinary Tavistock group prepared a generic statement of ethical principles to govern health care systems. This paper elaborates on these principles in two directions. First, it develops a set of quality standards, based on ethical principles, intended to regulate health care delivery and service management. Second, it focuses them on 'publicly oriented' (not necessarily governmental) as opposed to 'for profit' (not necessarily private) services. We propose ten principles or quality standards for these services, part of which relate to the individual patients, others to the community. They are political as well as technical, and can be used to inspire health policies, contracts issued by governments, and identification of partners by aid agencies. We analyse their application in key areas of health care by publicly oriented and for-profit health care organizations standards in developing countries, and conclude that the latter are unlikely to adopt the proposed standards. We further elaborate on the implications of the standards for publicly oriented services, focusing on care delivery and patient-centred care, family and community medicine, services management and disease control. Using these criteria for a renewed compact between authorities, health professionals and communities may help to motivate health professionals by bridging the gap between their professional and social-political identity.

Community Health Planning↗
PubMedDate not supplied

A code of best practice for disease control programmes to avoid damaging health care services in developing countries.

How should we implement disease control programmes so as to strengthen existing health systems? To answer this question, we re-examined the integration of these programmes from a managerial perspective. Based on a literature review, we concluded that integration is essential in the majority of cases. We went on to examine the mechanisms whereby the integration of disease control activities can jeopardize health care delivery, resulting in low service utilization, low detection and cure rates, and patient delays. To do this we clustered disease control programmes into three categories and assessed the impact of each on local health care facilities. From these results, we suggest a series of measures designed to help aid agencies and national governments support local health care infrastructures or, as a minimum, avoid damaging them. Whilst some vertical programmes should never be integrated, two conditions are essential to the integration of others: (1) Disease control needs to be integrated with general health care delivery--which implies the possibility to deliver general practice/family medicine care in publicly oriented health services. (2) Integration of both operational and administrative aspects should take place simultaneously. Any health policies in developing countries tending to allocate disease control programmes to government facilities and general health care to private facilities preclude their integration. They risk unravelling the fabric on which both disease control and health care delivery depend.

Benchmarking↗