Relative health performance in BRICS over the past 20 years: the winners and losers

Objective

To determine whether the health performance of Brazil, the Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa – the countries known as BRICS – has kept in step with their economic development.

Methods

Reductions in age- and sex-specific mortality seen in each BRICS country between 1990 and 2011 were measured. These results were compared with those of the best-performing countries in the world and the best-performing countries with similar income levels. We estimated each country’s progress in reducing mortality and compared changes in that country’s mortality rates against other countries with similar mean incomes to examine changes in avoidable mortality.

Findings

The relative health performance of the five study countries differed markedly over the study period. Brazil demonstrated fairly even improvement in relative health performance across the different age and sex subgroups that we assessed. India’s improvement was more modest and more varied across the subgroups. South Africa and the Russian Federation exhibited large declines in health performance as well as large sex-specific inequalities in health. Although China’s levels of avoidable mortality decreased in absolute terms, the level of improvement appeared low in the context of China’s economic growth.

Conclusion

When evaluating a country’s health performance in terms of avoidable mortality, it is useful to compare that performance against the performance of other countries. Such comparison allows any country-specific improvements to be distinguished from general global improvements.     

New initiatives to improve medication safety in hospitals

Medication errors constitute a significant public health problem and are recognised as such nowadays among healthcare professionals, societies, authorities and international organizations. This has led to seeking and implementing effective practices focused on improving medication use safety. This article briefly describes some of the most recent initiatives promoted to prevent medication errors in the hospital setting. These safety improvement initiatives are based upon progressively developing an institutional culture of safety and on establishing practices designed to reduce errors or detect them in time, thus avoiding adverse effects to patients. Among these recent initiatives are the safety practices approved by the National Quality Forum, and the National Patient Safety Goals that the Joint Commission on Healthcare Accreditation has required since 2003. Also mentioned are several strategies that have been offered to facilitate the application of these practices, among which are the Pathways to Medication Safely, the development of collaborative projects among hospitals and organizations of experts, and the inclusion of a medication safety specialist in hospitals as a support figure overseeing the application of safety measures. Finally, the challenges inherent in putting these preventive measures into real patient's care are discussed. The barriers confronting this step must obviously be faced if improvements in patient safety are truly to be achieved.