Overview

Many governments in the WHO European Region are reviewing their health care systems and the suitability of their existing approaches to financing, organizing and delivering health care services. Yet health care reform is inherently a normative as well as an economic and organizational activity. Pressures to achieve better expenditure control and/or greater productivity and efficiency need to be balanced against deeply rooted moral imperatives to maintain universal access to necessary care, and to improve the equity with which services are distributed across social classes.

This volume provides a broad overview of the health and health sector challenges faced by policy-makers in the European Region in the second half of the 1990s, and reviews the available evidence on the impact of key reform strategies. It is conceptual as well as empirical in approach, combining epidemiological, economic, organizational and managerial perspectives on the current status of health systems in both the eastern and western parts of the European Region. The study's findings are based on over 30 background papers written by a team of scholars from all parts of Europe, as well as from Canada, the World Bank and WHO.