[High blood pressure care: beyond the clinical setting].

The recommendations from the seventh report of the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure (JNC 7) were compared with those of a recent article by Aram V. Chobanian, Chairman of the JNC 7. The purpose was to identify the changes that this author proposed and determine how they might affect clinical work, as well as the health services and public health implications.

Public hospital management in times of crisis: lessons learned from Cienfuegos, Cuba (1996-2008).

Cuba's public health system is well known for its integrated first line services based on family medicine. Less publicized is the country's experience in public hospital management. After a harsh economic crisis in the first half of the 1990s had brought the Cienfuegos hospital near to collapse, from 1996 onwards the hospital management team took advantage of the incipient economic recovery to launch an ambitious recovery process.

[Health in Cuba and the millennium development goals].

The first assessments of the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations have been completed, and deliberations about world health are increasing. Now is an appropriate time to consider the case of Cuba, which has functioned under difficult conditions for many years, and followed its own path. Cuba's health indicators are much better than might be expected considering its level of income; in many cases the indicators compare to those of industrialized countries.

Health in Cuba.

The poorer countries of the world continue to struggle with an enormous health burden from diseases that we have long had the capacity to eliminate. Similarly, the health systems of some countries, rich and poor alike, are fragmented and inefficient, leaving many population groups underserved and often without health care access entirely. Cuba represents an important alternative example where modest infrastructure investments combined with a well-developed public health strategy have generated health status measures comparable with those of industrialized countries.