Evaluation of primary health care reform in Estonia

Agris Koppel, Kersti Meiesaar, Hannu Valtonen, Andrus Metsa and Margus Lember

Social Science & Medicine, 2003, vol. 56, issue 12, 2461-2466

Abstract: Estonia began to reform its health care system by reorganizing primary health care (PHC). Ten years ago, the health care system was inefficient, supply was biased towards institutional care, and PHC was almost non-existent in the western understanding: it was provided by different specialists in policlinics, and the financial basis of the system was in crisis. The reform had the following aims: to develop PHC by introducing family medicine, to guarantee the whole population access to family doctors' services, and to secure stable funding for these services. In 1998, a new phase in the reform was introduced through the creation of a new funding system for primary care services. The aim of this paper is to present a practically applicable set of indicators to evaluate PHC reform in terms of health economics criteria and then to apply these indicators in evaluation of the Estonian PHC reform.

Keywords: Estonia; Primary; health; care; reform; Evaluation; Set; of; indicators (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(02)00280-0
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:56:y:2003:i:12:p:2461-2466

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().