The glaucoma quality of life assessment.

In the next 15 years, expected increase in incidence of glaucoma is predicted. The glaucoma results in changes of quality of life of patients deteriorating in parallel with progression of stage of disease. The presence of many concomitant diseases in patients has significant impact on survival, exacerbations.

Findings from a Rapid Assessment of Avoidable Blindness (RAAB) in the Southwest Region of Kyrgyzstan.

: Reliable data on eye care needs in Kyrgyzstan are not readily available. The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence and causes of blindness and visual impairment in persons aged 50 and above in the southwest of Kyrgyzstan and to support the Ministry of Health (MoH) in the planning of eye care in the region.: A population-based survey was conducted in three states (Oblast) in the southwest region of Kyrgyzstan.

Good Health at Low Cost 25 years on: lessons for the future of health systems strengthening.

In 1985, the Rockefeller Foundation published Good health at low cost to discuss why some countries or regions achieve better health and social outcomes than do others at a similar level of income and to show the role of political will and socially progressive policies. 25 years on, the Good Health at Low Cost project revisited these places but looked anew at Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand, and the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which have all either achieved substantial improvements in health or access to services or implemented innovative health policies relative to their neighbours. A series of comparative case studies (2009-11) looked at how and why each region accomplished these changes.

Kyrgyzstan: Health system review.

Kyrgyzstan has undertaken wide-ranging reforms of its health system in a challenging socioeconomic and political context. The country has developed two major health reform programmes after becoming independent: Manas (1996 to 2006) and Manas Taalimi (2006 to 2010). These reforms introduced comprehensive structural changes to the health care delivery system with the aim of strengthening primary health care, developing family medicine and restructuring the hospital sector.

Bismarck meets Beveridge on the Silk Road: coordinating funding sources to create a universal health financing system in Kyrgyzstan.

Options for health financing reform are often portrayed as a choice between general taxation (known as the Beveridge model) and social health insurance (known as the Bismarck model). Ten years of health financing reform in Kyrgyzstan, since the introduction of its compulsory health insurance fund in 1997, provide an excellent example of why it is wrong to reduce health financing policy to a choice between the Beveridge and Bismarck models. Rather than fragment the system according to the insurance status of the population, as many other low- and middle-income countries have done, the Kyrgyz reforms were guided by the objective of having a single system for the entire population.