The social sciences in health policy and practice.

In this paper the role of the social sciences in health policy and practice is analysed. The analysis focuses on the disciplines of medical sociology and health economics. The authors attempt to describe the contribution of each of the two disciplines to health policy and health practice, firstly, be reviewing their developments in the past two decades and secondly, by analysing their future perspectives.

Health policy and health services research in The Netherlands.

This paper describes the development of health services research in The Netherlands in the last decade. For that purpose, an outline of the organisational structure of health research in general is presented first. It is shown that an increasing share of total resources for health research is allocated to health services research, now amounting to almost 10%.