Global Comparative Health Care Systems

Catalog description

This course introduces students to the components of health systems (populations, financing, payment, workforce, service delivery, information, medicines and technologies, governance) as they appear in various health system frameworks, and to the ways in which these components and their combinations vary from country to country around the world. The course focuses on comparisons across countries at the same economic level (high-, middle-, and low-income), as well as on comparisons across levels. The course also considers how to assess health system performance, with attention to how measures of performance are invariably tied to often implicit and varying conceptions of health from country to country and culture to culture. Students will learn about the most significant challenges facing health systems within each economic level and about successes and failures in meeting these challenges with health system reforms. The latter part of the course introduces students to the role of politics and policy in strengthening health systems. Throughout the course, students learn not only about health systems but also about what systems (physical, biological, social) are, how they function, and about how systems thinking can be applied fruitfully to the study of health systems. 001072