The World report on ageing and health: a policy framework for healthy ageing

Although populations around the world are rapidly ageing, evidence that increasing longevity is being accompanied by an extended period of good health is scarce. A coherent and focused public health response that spans multiple sectors and stakeholders is urgently needed. To guide this global response, WHO has released the first World report on ageing and health, reviewing current knowledge and gaps and providing a public health framework for action. The report is built around a redefinition of healthy ageing that centres on the notion of functional ability: the combination of the intrinsic capacity of the individual, relevant environmental characteristics, and ...

“Informed choice” in a time of too much medicine—no panacea for ethical difficulties

Providing information to enable informed choices about healthcare sounds immediately appealing to most of us. But Minna Johansson and colleagues argue that preventive medicine and expanding disease definitions have changed the ethical premises of informed choice and our good intentions may inadvertently advance overmedicalisation

The idea of informed patients who make reasoned decisions about their treatment based on personal preferences is appealing in a Western cultural context, with its focus on the autonomous individual. Rightly, many doctors now reject paternalism if the patient does not specifically ask for it. They prefer to elicit the patient’s preferences and embrace an ...

Presentation on the European Framework for Action on Integrated Health Services Delivery

Step-by-step guide for developing integrated health services delivery profiles

Health services delivery: a concept note

10 Best resources on… intersectionality with an emphasis on low- and middle-income countries

Intersectionality has emerged as an important framework for understanding and responding to health inequities by making visible the fluid and interconnected structures of power that create them. It promotes an understanding of the dynamic nature of the privileges and disadvantages that permeate health systems and affect health. It considers the interaction of different social stratifiers (e.g. 'race'/ ethnicity, indigeneity, gender, class, sexuality, geography, age, disability/ability, migration status, religion) and the power structures that underpin them at multiple levels. In doing so, it is a departure from previous health inequalities research that looked at these forms of social stratification ...

Community participation for transformative action on women's, children's and adolescents' health

The Global strategy for women's, children's and adolescents' health (2016-2030) recognizes that people have a central role in improving their own health. We propose that community participation, particularly communities working together with health services (co-production in health care), will be central for achieving the objectives of the global strategy. Community participation specifically addresses the third of the key objectives: to transform societies so that women, children and adolescents can realize their rights to the highest attainable standards of health and well-being. In this paper, we examine what this implies in practice. We discuss three interdependent areas for action ...

GPCC Person-centred care research centre web site

This research centre web site contains a range of information, films, presentations, resources and links; from basic information on person-centred care to information on a wide range of individual research projects from health and elderly care and rehabilitation. It also contains news, events, scientific publications and implementation.

The Gothenburg University Centre for Person-centred Care (GPCC) is an interdisciplinary research centre, established in January 2010, with the support of the Swedish government's strategic investment in health and care research. Uniquely GPCC has evaluated the effects of person-centred care in controlled studies. This has established that person-centred care is capable of ...

Person-centered care - ready for prime time

Long-term diseases are today the leading cause of mortality worldwide and are estimated to be the leading cause of disability by 2020. Person-centered care (PCC) has been shown to advance concordance between care provider and patient on treatment plans, improve health outcomes and increase patient satisfaction. Yet, despite these and other documented benefits, there are a variety of significant challenges to putting PCC into clinical practice. Although care providers today broadly acknowledge PCC to be an important part of care, in our experience we must establish routines that initiate, integrate, and safeguard PCC in daily clinical practice to ensure that ...

Health-care improvements in a financially constrained environment

Although the European Council agreed on common values such as good quality, universally accessible care in 1996, those values are now under threat. Health expenditure in all European Union (EU) countries between 1996 and 2013 increased from 7·9% to 9·5% of gross domestic product. There is a need to adapt to a financially constrained environment.

WE CARE is an EU Seventh Framework Programme consortium tasked to propose a research and development roadmap for innovative, cost-contained, quality care. The roadmap should not only consider efficacy from clinical trials but also community effectiveness, including the appropriateness of services provided.