Managed Care in a Public Setting

This book discusses health care, which has gone through profound changes in the preceding decades. Most of this change has been in what is possible, clinically speaking. These changes have transgressed international boundaries by virtue of the international nature of and ease of access to the literature and the internationality of health care conferences and the use of the internet. Many different actors deserve credit for these developments, from individual doctors, nurses, therapists and innovators to local, regional, national and international health care organisations. Much change has also come about due to the migration of quality assurance thinking from industrial realms to health care. This has not been anywhere near as uniformly distributed as state of the art care, however. Even across centres of excellence for treatment of specific diseases, large differences in quality assurance can be found, and one can also easily identify even more glaring deficiencies in quality of care in areas, where there is insufficient funding to make quality care available for all.