Canada - World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe

Health systems in transition Canada 177
by the WHO Regional Office for Europe for the purpose of monitoring Health
in All Policies in Europe. It is updated for distribution twice a year from various
sources, relying largely upon official figures provided by governments, as well
as health statistics collected by the technical units of the WHO Regional Office
for Europe. The standard Health for All data have been officially approved
by national governments. With its summer 2007 edition, the Health for All
database started to take account of the enlarged EU of 27 Member States.
HiT authors are encouraged to discuss the data in the text in detail, including
the standard figures prepared by the Observatory staff, especially if there are
concerns about discrepancies between the data available from different sources.
A typical HiT consists of nine chapters.
1. Introduction: outlines the broader context of the health system, including
geography and sociodemography, economic and political context, and
population health.
2. Organization and governance: provides an overview of how the health
system in the country is organized, governed, planned and regulated, as
well as the historical background of the system; outlines the main actors
and their decision-making powers; and describes the level of patient
empowerment in the areas of information, choice, rights, complaints
procedures, public participation and cross-border health care.
3. Financing: provides information on the level of expenditure and the
distribution of health spending across different service areas, sources of
revenue, how resources are pooled and allocated, who is covered, what
benefits are covered, the extent of user charges and other out-of-pocket
payments, voluntary health insurance and how providers are paid.
4. Physical and human resources: deals with the planning and distribution of
capital stock and investments, infrastructure and medical equipment; the
context in which IT systems operate; and human resource input into the
health system, including information on workforce trends, professional
mobility, training and career paths.
5. Provision of services: concentrates on the organization and delivery
of services and patient flows, addressing public health, primary care,
secondary and tertiary care, day care, emergency care, pharmaceutical
care, rehabilitation, long-term care, services for informal carers, palliative
care, mental health care, dental care, complementary and alternative
medicine, and health services for specific populations.