The paper deals with the weakness of the Czech public finance - the lack of performance information. The budgeting in the Czech Republic still relies on the incremental method and omits using of performance indicators. On the contrary, most of the OECD member countries has adopted some type of...

Emergency departments are the front line of health care systems and play a critical role in ensuring an efficient and high-quality response for patients in stress or crisis situations. A growing demand for emergency care might however reduce patients’ satisfaction (through waiting times),...

Building on published patient safety research literature, this paper aims to broaden the existing knowledge base on safety lapses occurring in primary and ambulatory care settings. The findings of this paper show that safety lapses in primary and ambulatory care are common. About half of the...

In the 21st century care, the old paradigm “because the doctor said so” no longer holds. Individuals are now seeking ways to understand their health options and take more control over their health decisions. But this is not an easy task. Professionals continue to use medical jargon, drug...

This paper provides a detailed description of health coverage in OECD countries in 2012. It includes information on the organisation of health coverage (residence-based vs contributory systems), on the range of benefits covered by basic health coverage and on cost-sharing requirements. It also...

Out-of-hours (OOH) services provide urgent primary care when primary care physician (PCP) offices are closed, most often from 5pm on weekdays and all day on weekends and holidays. Based on a policy survey (covering 27 OECD countries) and the existing literature, the working paper describes the...

Since 2000 several papers have examined the efficiency of healthcare delivery systems worldwide. These papers have extended the literature using drastically different input and output combinations from one another, with little theoretical or empirical support backing these specifications. Issues...

Many OECD countries have undergone reforms over the past decade to introduce advanced roles for nurses in primary care to improve access to care, quality of care and/or to reduce costs. This working paper provides an analysis of these nurse role developments and reforms in 37 OECD and EU...

The OECD has been leading the work on international comparisons of patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) across its member states for over a decade. This paper synthesises national developments in relation to measuring and monitoring PREMs between 2006 and 2016 across countries...

The incentive structures produced by different institutional arrangements in health systems are important determinants of their performance, and can explain some of the differences in cross-country performance patterns. This paper proposes an approach and quantitative method to investigate how...