Assignment Task
Overview
Countries frequently introduce health reforms to improve health system performance. The success of those reforms depends on the national context and implementation factors. Critically review current health system reforms in a high-income health system. What can Australia learn from these health system reforms? To respond to this question, you are asked to critically review the literature on recent health reforms in ONE of the following countries: New Zealand, Denmark, Germany, Singapore, Mexico and the United Kingdom.
Instruction
Undertake a literature review and draw upon this evidence to:
a. Describe the current health care system reforms (innovations) for your chosen country;
b. Consider how health system components relate to other components (i.e. service delivery, financing, health workforce, leadership and governance, health information systems, essential medical products, and technologies);
c. Reflect on the likely impact of the innovations on health system performance measures of efficiency, equity and quality;
d. Outline what key successes that other country can learn from your chosen country’s experiences of health reform.
Introduction
Your introduction should outline key features and challenges for your chosen health system and indicate what current system-wide reforms will be discussed, and why.
Search strategy
Write a summary of how you found relevant academic literature by outlining your search strategy, (search engine and database used, naming your search terms, detailing additional methods that you used for identifying relevant references, Boolean operators, inclusion/exclusion criteria, grey literature, government websites). This should include a summary of the type of sources and date range (you are encouraged to focus on literature from the last 5 years). You should draw on approx. 20 sources of evidence. Comment on how you evaluated the relevance or value of the academic and non-academic literature.
Body
In this section you need to expand on the outline presented in the introduction, go beyond describing the system-wide reforms and critically analyse the literature by identifying the main arguments presented and if there are differing perspectives or gaps in the literature. Comment on the likely impact on the measures of efficiency, equity, and quality. Consider how national policies, values, and expectations shape health system Make comment on the implementation issues. You can also make comment on other emergent themes from your literature search (academic and non-academic) that interest you, and why?
Conclusion
Your conclusion should summarise the lessons learnt and the key successes from the international health reforms.