Why We Must Talk About Institutional Corruption to Understand Wrongdoing in the Health Sector Comment on "We Need to Talk About Corruption in Health Systems".

While various forms of corruption are common in many health systems around the world, defining wrongdoing in terms of legality and the use of public office for private gain obstructs our understanding of its nature and intractability. To address this, I suggest, we must not only break the silence about the extent of wrongdoing in the health sector, but also talk differently about corruption in general, and corruption in healthcare specifically. I propose adopting the notion of institutional corruption (IC) developed by Thompson and Lessig, as divergence from the original purpose of the institution, which may not be illegal but may nevertheless cause harm to people who depend on it by creating perverse dependencies and compelling individuals to act against its core purpose.

A Crisis of Humanitarianism: Refugees at the Gates of Europe.

Having initially welcomed more than a million refugees and forced migrants into Europe between 2015 and 2016, the European Union's (EU's) policy has shifted toward externalising migration control to Turkey and Northern Africa. This goes against the spirit of international conventions aiming to protect vulnerable populations, yet there is widespread indifference toward those who remain stranded in Italy, Greece and bordering Mediterranean countries. Yet there are tens of thousands living in overcrowded reception facilities that have, in effect, turned into long-term detention centres with poor health and safety for those awaiting resettlement or asylum decisions.

Why and how is compassion necessary to provide good quality healthcare?

Recent disclosures of failures of care in the National Health Service (NHS) in England have led to debates about compassion deficits disallowing health professionals to provide high quality responsive care. While the link between high quality care and compassion is often taken for granted, it is less obvious how compassion - often originating in the individual's emotional response - can become a moral sentiment and lead to developing a system of norms and values underpinning ethics of care. In this editorial, I argue why and how compassion might become a foundation of ethics guiding health professionals and a basis for ethics of care in health service organisations.

Can consumer choice replace trust in the National Health Service in England? Towards developing an affective psychosocial conception of trust in health care.

Trust has long been regarded as a vitally important aspect of the relationship between health service providers and patients. Recently, consumer choice has been increasingly advocated as a means of improving the quality and effectiveness of health service provision. However, it is uncertain how the increase of information necessary to allow users of health services to exercise choice, and the simultaneous introduction of markets in public health systems, will affect various dimensions of trust, and how changing relations of trust will impact upon patients and services.

Is patient choice the future of health care systems?

Patient and user choice are at the forefront of the debate on the future direction of health and public services provision in many industrialized countries in Europe and elsewhere. It is used both, as a means to achieve desired policy goals in public health care systems such as greater efficiency and improved quality of care, and as a good with its own intrinsic value. However, the evidence suggests that its impact on efficiency and quality is at best a very limited while it might have negative consequences on equity because the pre-existing inequalities of income and education could influence patients' access to information and, consequently, choices.

Priority setting and implementation in a centralized health system: a case study of Kerman province in Iran.

The question of how priority setting processes work remains topical, contentious and political in every health system across the globe. It is particularly acute in the context of developing countries because of the mismatch between needs and resources, which is often compounded by an underdeveloped capacity for decision making and weak institutional infrastructures. Yet there is limited research into how the process of setting and implementing health priorities works in developing countries.

Towards developing new partnerships in public services: users as consumers, citizens and/or co-producers in health and social care in England and Sweden.

The causes and effects of marketization of public services have been analysed extensively in the literature, but there is relatively little research on how those policies impact on the development of new forms of governance, and the role of users in these new arrangements. This study reviews examples of competition, freedom of choice and personalized care in health and social services in England and Sweden, in order to examine the type of relationships emerging between the user/consumer vis-à-vis market driven providers and various agencies of the state under the marketized welfare. The article focuses on the possible roles users might assume in new hybrid arrangements between markets, collaborations and steering.

Patient choice and equity in the British National Health Service: towards developing an alternative framework.

Choice and competition have been phased into many public health systems with the aim of achieving various and potentially exclusive goals such as improving efficiency, quality and responsiveness to users' needs. Yet their use to promote equity of access as evidenced recently in the British National Health Service (the NHS) is unprecedented. Giving users the power of exit over unresponsive providers is meant to address the failures of previous policies.

What benefits will choice bring to patients? Literature review and assessment of implications.

Objectives: To assess the demand for, and likely impact of, increasing patient choice in health care. The study examined whether patients would like to exercise choice of hospital, primary care provider and treatment, and investigated the likely impact of policies designed to increase choice on equity of access, and on the efficiency and quality of service delivery.

Method: Theory-based literature review including an analysis of the intended and unintended impact of choice-related policies in health care in the UK, European Union and USA.

Users' perceptions of health care reforms: quality of care and patient rights in four regions in the Russian Federation.

In the early 1990s, the government of the Russian Federation (RF) decided to depart from the centralised and integrated model of health service delivery and financing in favour of mandatory social health insurance (MHI). The rationale for introducing social health insurance in Russia in the early 1990s was primarily to secure a reliable source of funding but also to improve the quality of care and introduce user entitlements known as patient rights. This paper discusses findings of a survey carried out in 1999-2000 to explore users' perceptions of reforms, changes in quality of care and their satisfaction with patient rights in Murmansk, Yaroslavl, Moscow Region and Moscow City, using a structured questionnaire and metric scales.