The World Health Organization (WHO) defines a health system as all the activities whose primary purpose is to promote, restore, or maintain health. The World Bank defines health systems more broadly to include factors interrelated to health, such as poverty, education, infrastructure and the broader social and political environment. Developing countries face many challenges to building robust, reliable health systems.
This book has chapters, which deal with overview of healthcare systems around the globe, healthcare systems in India as well as other third world countries and western world including United States. There is a beautiful description of primary healthcare system. The topics on outsourcing and health tourism are contemporary and have immense value from the point of view of developing public private partnerships and creating health infrastructure which will serve not only the needs of our population but also serve as a self sustaining industry.
The ultimate goal of our endeavours should be to strengthen our system so as to control communicable as well as noncommunicable diseases and march towards early achievement of millennium development goals. This would require a good blend of horizontal and vertical programming, which has been nicely discussed in this book.
This book will provide useful material to the readers that will enable them in contributing better towards development of efficient healthcare systems in our country. |
