How pharmacists can contribute to health promotion

Medicines are considered the main therapeutical tool for the treatment or maintenance of public health conditions. However, the symbolism in wich they are cloaked and thus their use by society, has contributed to the emergence of many adverse events with high impact on health and health systems costs. Thus, rational drug use promotion is an important tool to eliminate or minimize the problem. This is where the pharmacists can play an important role because this is a pertinent subject in their field of performance. Their participation in multidisciplinary teams adds value to health services and contributes to health promotion. This article addresses these issues and how pharmacists can contribute to health promotion.     

Between two waves. Catholic healthcare providers must value their tradition and embrace the future

By paying attention to our personal individuation process, our inner work, we can better deal with whatever the world presents. Much of the chaos healthcare is experiencing today is because we are currently trying to become more conscious both individually and organizationally. The future of Catholic healthcare is in recognizing the call, the challenge, the moral imperative to facilitate the creation of healthy communities. We must reflect on and understand health not as a commodity, but rather as both a process and a state of being that is at once personal and collective. In indigenous cultures there has always been an understanding of the deep connection between personal and community health and between spiritual, mental, and physical health. The current synchronistic shift from professional-directed, acute care to an awareness of how the individual psyche and society in general influence health and well-being is spurring Americans to focus on mind-body and healthy-community concepts. If we can "stay present" to the mission of healthcare-keep people well, prevent disease, deal with the causes and symptoms of illness, create healthy communities-we will have a future in healthcare delivery. We can do this by being healthy ourselves, recognizing our global responsibility for health, and providing direct services.     

Employers and the exchanges under the small business health options program: examining the potential and the pitfalls

The health insurance exchange is the centerpiece of the insurance reforms created by the Affordable Care Act. The Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) is intended to create a marketplace for small, and perhaps eventually large, employers to purchase health insurance for their employees. This paper introduces a collection of articles that illuminate the need for small-business exchanges and discuss how they will function. The paper also describes the difficulties these exchanges will face, as well as the opportunities they will offer to states, employers, and individuals. The success or failure of small-business exchanges may well hinge on how states choose to address these challenges.     

More than half of individual health plans offer coverage that falls short of what can be sold through exchanges as of 2014

The Affordable Care Act creates state-based health exchanges that will begin acting as a market place for health insurance plans and consumers in 2014. This paper compares the financial protection offered by today's group and individual plans with the standards that will apply to insurance sold in state-based exchanges. Some states may apply these standards to all health insurance sold within the state. More than half of Americans who had individual insurance in 2010 were enrolled in plans that would not qualify as providing essential coverage under the rules of the exchanges in 2014. These people were enrolled in plans with an actuarial value below 60 percent, which means that the plans covered less than that proportion of the enrollees' health expenses. Many of today's individual health plans are below the "bronze" level, the lowest level of plan that can be sold through exchanges. In contrast, most group plans in 2010 had an actuarial benefit of 80-89 percent and would qualify as highly rated "gold" plans in the exchanges. To sell to ten million new buyers on the exchanges, insurers will need to redesign benefit packages. Combined with a ban on medical underwriting, the individual insurance market in a post-health reform world will sharply contrast with the market of past decades.     

How to measure the value of health

The importance of health to an individual is believed to influencethat individual's behavior with respect to their health. Thisidea is incorporated in several of the theories used to explainhealth behavior. Measurement of the value or importance of healthis frequently omitted, however, from research based on thesetheories. This omission is due partly to the difficulty of measuringthe value of health. The issues, problems and possible solutionsto measuring the value of health are discussed.     

How can quality of life researchers make their work more useful to health workers and their patients?

To make optimal use of data from randomized trials in clinical decision-making, clinicians require knowledge of the magnitude of treatment effects. Reports of trials including quality of life data often fail to report results that provide interpretable estimates of magnitude of effect. Strategies that investigators could use to remedy this problem include reporting mean differences between groups in relation to the minimal important difference and reporting the proportion of patients who benefit from treatment and the associated number needed to treat. Techniques are available that allow investigators to use the same strategies in reporting pooled estimates from meta-analyses, even when studies use different instruments to measure the same construct. These reporting approaches, as well as ensuring access to data from individual items, will also help those developing decision aids to use quality of life data.     

The business case for quality mental health services: why employers should care about the mental health and well-being of their employees

Employers are very concerned about rising mental health care costs. They want to know whether their health care spending is improving the health of workers, and whether there is a productivity payback from providing good mental health care. This article addresses the subject of employee depression and its impact on business. The literature suggests that depressed individuals exert a significant cost burden for employers. Evidence is mounting that worker depression may have its greatest impact on productivity losses, including increased absenteeism and short-term disability, higher turnover, and suboptimal performance at work. Although there is no conclusive evidence yet that physical health care costs decrease when depression is effectively treated, there is growing evidence that productivity improvements occur as a consequence of effective treatment, and those improvements may offset the cost of the treatment.     

How can developing countries harness biotechnology to improve health?

Background  

The benefits of genomics and biotechnology are concentrated primarily in the industrialized world, while their potential to combat neglected diseases in the developing world has been largely untapped. Without building developing world biotechnology capacity to address local health needs, this disparity will only intensify. To assess the potential of genomics to address health needs in the developing world, the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health, along with local partners, organized five courses on Genomics and Public Health Policy in the developing world. The overall objective of the courses was to collectively explore how to best harness genomics to improve health in each region. This article presents and analyzes the recommendations from all five courses.