Healthcare by country

Question

This piglix contains articles or sub-piglix about Healthcare by country

Answer 1

Healthcare in Slovenia

Health care in Slovenia is organised primarily through the Health Insurance Institute of Slovenia.

In 2008 around 3 billion Euros, 8.10% of the Gross domestic product was allocated to health expenditures.

It was ranked 15th in the Euro health consumer index 2015 and second in the 2012 Euro Hepatitis Index,

It had the third highest rate of obesity in Europe in 2015. 27% of the adult population had a body mass index of 30 or more.

See List of hospitals in Slovenia

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Answer 2

Healthcare in Serbia

Healthcare in Serbia is delivered by means of a universal health care system, although corruption, inefficiency, and a physician shortage are major problems.

The healthcare system is managed by the National Health Insurance Fund, which covers all citizens and permanent residents. All employees, self-employed persons, and pensioners must pay contributions to it. Contributions are based on a sliding scale, with wealthier members of society paying higher percentages of their income. Despite this, corruption remains a serious problem due to low salaries, with many doctors demanding bribes in exchange for better treatment, although there is a major campaign against corruption from the government and NGOs.

In 2011, there was 1 physician for every 344 inhabitants, and 5.7 hospital beds for every 1,000 inhabitants.

The Serbian government is working with the World Bank in improving the quality and efficiency of Serbia's healthcare system.

In the past few decades, there have been numerous changes in the healthcare system that were set up when Serbia was a Republic of Yugoslavia. During those years, healthcare was free but practically unavailable to all people, there were no fixed prices, and services were often abused. Today, reforms have mandated but failed to implement a basic level of health services for all people, but at varying levels or co-payment. Services not covered may be supplemented by private insurance. Current concerns in the field of Serbian healthcare, as reported by the medical staff providing care, are poor funding for primary care, inadequate equipment and supplies, inadequate salaries, and inadequate continuing medical education. Overall, the recent healthcare reforms have tried to change the emphasis from curative to preventative care.

The government elected on 27 April 2014 is said to be making a sincere effort to reform the healthcare system. The Chairperson of “Doctors Against Corruption” has been appointed a Special Adviser to the Ministry of Health.

The culture of healthcare in Serbia may be considered very corrupt.Self care is mainly practiced when a patient is already ill versus as a preventative measure. Care is usually sought from healthcare professionals such as doctors or nurses where bribes are commonly expected, but some folk medications are used such as teas, vinegar, herbs, and vitamins. Changes in activity levels such as more rest or increased exercise are sometimes used as curative measures for illness, and perceived causes of illness may be improper diet or fate. Hjelm, Bard, Nyberg, and Apleqvist (2005) state that most former Yugoslavians feel health is not the absence of disease, but rather it is “wealth and the most important thing in life…to have enough strength” (p. 51).

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Answer 3

Health care in Saudi Arabia

The health care system in Saudi Arabia can be classified as a national health care system in which the government provides health care services through a number of government agencies. In the meantime, there is a growing role and increased participation from the private sector in the provision of health care services.

The Ministry of Health (MOH) is the major government agency entrusted with the provision of preventive, curative and rehabilitative health care for the Kingdom’s population. The Ministry provides primary health care (PHC) services through a network of health care centers (comprising 1,925 centers) throughout the kingdom. It also adopts the referral system which provides curative care for all members of society from the level of general practitioners at health centers to advanced technology specialist curative services through a broad base of general and specialist hospitals (220 hospitals). The MOH is considered the lead Government agency responsible for the management, planning, financing and regulating of the health care sector. The MOH also undertakes the overall supervision and follow-up of health care related activities carried out by the private sector. Therefore, the MOH can be viewed as a national health service (NHS) for the entire population.

There are also three other mini-NHS which finance and deliver primary, secondary and tertiary care to specific enrolled security and armed forces populations: the Ministry of Defense and Aviation (MODA), the Ministry of Interior (MOI) and the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG). In addition to these agencies, there are several autonomous government agencies which are responsible for the delivery and financing of health care services in the KSA. The Ministry of Education provides immediate primary health care to students. The Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs operates institutions for the mentally retarded and custodial homes for orphans. These facilities provide their guests a certain amount of medical care. The General Organization for Social Insurance and General Presidency of Youth Welfare provide health services for certain categories of the population in connection with its management of sport facilities. The Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu provides health facilities for employees and residents at the two industrial cities (Jubail and Yanbu). The Saudi Arabian Airlines operates its own health care facilities with the aim of providing health care services to its employees. The Kingdom’s universities provide, through their medical colleges or hospitals, specialist curative services and medical education and training programs, while they also conduct health research in collaboration with other research centers.

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Answer 4

Healthcare in Sweden

The Swedish health care system is mainly government-funded and decentralized, although private health care also exists. The health care system in Sweden is financed primarily through taxes levied by county councils and municipalities.

Sweden's health care system is organized and managed on three levels: national, regional and local. At the national level, the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs establishes principles and guidelines for care and sets the political agenda for health and medical care. The ministry along with other government bodies supervises activities at the lower levels, allocates grants and periodically evaluates services to ensure correspondence to national goals.

At the regional level, responsibility for financing and providing health care is decentralized to the 21 county councils. A county council is a political body whose representatives are elected by the public every four years on the same day as the national general election. The executive board or hospital board of a county council exercises authority over hospital structure and management, and ensures efficient health care delivery. County councils also regulate prices and level of service offered by private providers. Private providers are required to enter into a contract with the county councils. Patients are not reimbursed for services from private providers who do not have an agreement with the county councils. According to the Swedish health and medical care policy, every county council must provide residents with good-quality health services and medical care and work toward promoting good health in the entire population.

At the local level, municipalities are responsible for maintaining the immediate environment of citizens such as water supply and social welfare services. Recently, post discharge care for the disabled and elderly, and long term care for psychiatric patients was decentralized to the local municipalities.

County councils have considerable leeway in deciding how care should be planned and delivered. This explains the wide regional variations.

It is informally divided into 7 sections: "Close-to-home care" (primary care clinics, maternity care clinics, out-patient psychiatric clinics, etc.), emergency care, elective care, in-patient care, out-patient care, specialist care, and dental care.

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Answer 5

Healthcare in Switzerland

Healthcare in Switzerland is universal and is regulated by the Swiss Federal Law on Health Insurance. There are no free state-provided health services, but private health insurance is compulsory for all persons residing in Switzerland (within three months of taking up residence or being born in the country). International civil servants, members of embassies, and their family members are exempted from compulsory health insurance. Requests for exemptions are handled by the respective cantonal authority and have to be addressed to them directly.

The whole healthcare system is geared toward the general goals of keeping the system competitive across cantonal lines, promoting general public health and reducing costs while encouraging individual responsibility.

Health insurance covers the costs of medical treatment and hospitalisation of the insured. However, the insured person pays part of the cost of treatment. This is done (a) by means of an annual deductible (called the franchise), which ranges from CHF 300 (PPP-adjusted US$ 184) to a maximum of CHF 2,500 (PPP-adjusted $1,534) for an adult as chosen by the insured person (premiums are adjusted accordingly) and (b) by a charge of 10% of the costs over and above the excess up to a stop-loss amount of CHF 700 (PPP-adjusted $429).

Switzerland has an infant mortality rate of about 3.6 out of 1,000. The general life expectancy in 2013 was for men 80.5 years compared to 84.8 years for women. These are among the world's best figures.

Swiss are required to purchase basic health insurance, which covers a range of treatments detailed in the Swiss Federal Law on Health Insurance (German: Krankenversicherungsgesetz (KVG); French: la loi fédérale sur l’assurance-maladie (LAMal); Italian: legge federale sull’assicurazione malattie (LAMal)). It is therefore the same throughout the country and avoids double standards in healthcare. Insurers are required to offer this basic insurance to everyone, regardless of age or medical condition. They are not allowed to make a profit off this basic insurance, but can on supplemental plans.

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Answer 6

Healthcare in Taiwan

Healthcare in Taiwan is administered by the Ministry of Health and Welfare of the Executive Yuan. As with other developed economies, Taiwanese people are well-nourished but face such health problems as chronic obesity and heart disease. In 2002 Taiwan had nearly 1.6 physicians and 5.9 hospital beds per 1,000 population. In 2002, there were a total of 36 hospitals and 2,601 clinics in the country. Per capita health expenditures totaled US$752 in 2000. Health expenditures constituted 5.8 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2001 (or US$951 in 2009); 64.9 percent of the expenditures were from public funds. Overall life expectancy in 2009 was 78 years.

Recent major health issues include the SARS crisis in 2003, though the island was later declared safe by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The current healthcare system in Taiwan, known as National Health Insurance (NHI, Chinese: 全民健康保險), was instituted in 1995. NHI is a single-payer compulsory social insurance plan which centralizes the disbursement of healthcare funds. The system promises equal access to healthcare for all citizens, and the population coverage had reached 99% by the end of 2004. NHI is mainly financed through premiums, which are based on the payroll tax, and is supplemented with out-of-pocket payments and direct government funding. In the initial stage, fee-for-service predominated for both public and private providers. Most health providers operate in the private sector and form a competitive market on the health delivery side. However, many healthcare providers took advantage of the system by offering unnecessary services to a larger number of patients and then billing the government. In the face of increasing loss and the need for cost containment, NHI changed the payment system from fee-for-service to a global budget, a kind of prospective payment system, in 2002.

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Answer 7

Health care in Turkey

Health care in Turkey consists of a mix of public and private health services. Turkey has universal health care under its Universal Health Insurance (Genel Sağlık Sigortası) system. Under this system, all residents registered with the Social Security Institution (SGK) can receive medical treatment free of charge in hospitals contracted to the SGK.

The following medical treatments are covered by the SGK:

While some SGK-contracted hospitals offer dental care, in most cases, patients must rely on private dental services and are responsible for covering the costs. In addition, patients must partially cover the cost of some prescription drugs and outpatient services.

There is also a large private healthcare sector. Private health services often offer shorter waiting lists and higher quality services. Most banks and insurance companies offer health plans, and contract with certain hospitals and doctors.

The Turkish healthcare system used to be dominated by a centralized state system run by the Ministry of Health. In 2003 the governing Justice and Development Party introduced a sweeping health reform program aimed at increasing the ratio of private to state health provision and making health care available to a larger share of the population. Information from the Turkish Statistical Institute states that 76.3 billion liras are being spent on healthcare annually, with 79.6% of funding coming from the Social Security Institute and most of the remainder (15.4%) coming from out-of-pocket payments. There are 27.954 medical institutions, 1.7 doctor for every 1000 people and 2.54 beds for 1000 people.

Private healthcare has increased in Turkey in the last decade due to the long queues and personal service in state-run hospitals. Most private hospitals have contracts with various insurance companies so it is now possible to receive treatment that varies from the state. After rising competition from private hospitals, there has been an increase in the quality of state hospitals. At 7.6% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2005, Turkey’s public expenditure on national health was below average than that of the developed countries, although the percentage has increased steadily since 2000. In the early 2000s, about 63 percent of health expenditures came from public sources. In 2006 there was one doctor for every 700 people, one nurse for every 580 people, and one hospital bed for every 380 people. The rural population is poorly served by the health care system, which is much more developed in the western half of the country. Between 80 and 90 percent of the population, including self-employed workers, have health care provided by the national pension system, but are often drawn to private health providers in urban areas due to the higher-quality care. Although the private health industry has grown rapidly since the 1990s, only about 2% of the population, mainly in urban areas, has private health insurance. In 2005 about 75 percent of private health expenditures were out-of-pocket rather than being covered by insurance.

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Answer 8

Healthcare in Ukraine

As of March 2009 the Ukrainian government planned to reforming the health care system, by the creation of a national network of family doctors and improvements in the medical emergency services.Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko wanted (in November 2009) to start introducing a public healthcare system based on health insurance in the spring of 2010.

Further reform was promised by Health Minister Alexander Kvitashvili in 2014 but proposals failed to make political progress and he offered his resignation - which was not accepted. State funding for hospitals cover only the electricity and meagre staff salaries, leading to widespread bribery. Even hot water is a problem. Charitable donations are needed to buy even basic medicines or fuel needed to visit patients.

Although some companies (in their collective agreement) supply their employees insurance medicine Ukraine doesn't. But it is making a switch to insurance medicine, a transformation that will start in 2017 and will last until 2020.

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Answer 9

Healthcare in the United Arab Emirates

Standards of health care are considered to be generally high in the United Arab Emirates, resulting from increased government spending during strong economic years. According to the UAE government, total expenditures on health care from 1996 to 2003 were Aed1,601,384,360.05 [US$436 million]. According to the World Health Organisation, in 2004 total expenditures on health care constituted 2.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and the per capita expenditure for health care was US$497. Healthcare currently is free only for UAE citizens. UAE has seven Emirates.

The World bank ranked Dubai and Abu Dhabi as being the 2nd and 3rd, respectively, most popular medical tourism destinations in the region, behind Jordan.In first half of 2015, Dubai attracted 260,000 medical tourists

The start of modern health care in the United Arab Emirates can be traced to the days when the area was known as the Trucial States. In 1943, a small healthcare centre was opened in the Al Ras area of Dubai. In 1951, under the patronage of Sheikh Saeed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, the first phase of the Al Maktoum Hospital was built and continued over succeeding years until a 157-bed hospital was completed. In 1960, Sheikhs Shakhbut and Zayed of Abu Dhabi visited an American mission in Muscat and were so impressed by what they saw that they invited the couple in charge, Pat and Marian Kennedy, to open a clinic in Al Ain, which they did in the November of that year. This became officially known as the Oasis Hospital, unofficially as the “Kennedy Hospital” to local people. In 1966, a small outpatient department opened in Abu Dhabi, followed a year later by the appointment of Dr Philip Horniblow with a brief to develop a national health service. This led the then ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed, to open a new hospital, the Central Hospital, in 1968. The Private sector has also made enormous contributions in the U.A.E led by Iranian Hospital, Dubai, the Gulf Medical University and the GMC Hospitals as the pioneers in private medical education and healthcare sectors.

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Answer 10

Health care in Venezuela

After the Bolivarian Revolution, extensive inoculation programs and the availability of low- or no-cost health care provided by the Venezuelan Institute of Social Security made Venezuela's health care infrastructure one of the more advanced in Latin America. However, by 2015, the Venezuelan health care system had collapsed.

Venezuelan state governments operated only 5 facilities in 1979, down from about 60 hospitals in 1970 since the Ministry of Health and Social Assistance (MSAS) took over many of the hospitals.

In 1978, a presidential election year, medical sales in Venezuela hit an all-time high at the time and dropped in 1979. In 1979, there were approximately 250 hospitals in Venezuela with MSAS operating the majority of 58%. Venezuela had a shortage of medical professionals and hospital beds in the late 1970s due to highly increasing population and the lack of specializing in being a specific medical technician. The lack of both professionals and beds was higher in rural areas compared to more populated areas. Between 1978 and 1980, Venezuela had 14,771 doctors, 8,805 nurses and 28,04 nursing auxiliaries.

Under the Sixth National Plan of Luis Herrera Campins, the Campins government planned to increase medical funding by 9.7% annually between 1981 and 1985, with medical expenditures planned to reach $2.1 billion in 1985. $1.2 billion were designated to the construction of new facilities to combat bed shortages, with a main focus on establishing clinics in order to avoid inefficiency of larger hospitals. Rehabilitation of handicapped individuals and the concentration on heart disease, the leading cause of death in Venezuela, were also focused on in the Sixth National Plan. Medical professionals in Venezuela were "extremely U.S. oriented", with most doctors attending post-graduate work in the United States, were able to speak English, read U.S. medical journals and attended gatherings of United States medical experts. In 1981, over 70% of healthcare services were government administered.

Foreign medical equipment developed abroad was quickly adopted and shipped to Venezuela with most of the country's medical goods needing to be imported. In 1980, Venezuela imported 47% of medical goods from the United States, 13% from Germany, 8% from Japan and 3% from the United Kingdom. The majority of medical equipment was distributed by a conglomerate of about 45 distributors known as Associacion Venezolana de Distribuidores de Equips Medicos (AVEDEM) while 15% of medical products were distributed by smaller entities.

From 1992 to 1993, there was a cholera epidemic in the Orinoco Delta and Venezuela's political leaders were accused of racial profiling of their own indigenous people to deflect blame from the country's institutions, thereby aggravating the epidemic. From 1992 to 1993, there was a cholera epidemic in the Orinoco Delta and Venezuela's political leaders were accused of racial profiling of their own indigenous people to deflect blame from the country's institutions, thereby aggravating the epidemic. During the 1995–99 period, the mortality rate was 162.3 per 100,000 population for diseases of the circulatory system, 63.8 for malignant neoplasms, 55.3 for external causes, 53.6 for communicable diseases, and 22.4 for certain conditions originating before birth.

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