Vivian Lin

La Trobe University · Department of Public Health

Health systems worldwide face considerable challenges in recruiting, training, distributing and retaining a sufficiently skilled and competent workforce when and where it is needed. Brought into sharp focus by the COVID-19 pandemic, these challenges are compounded by the myriad of changes to health systems and workforces – increasing volume and pri...

Background Health practitioner regulation (HPR) systems are increasingly recognized as playing an important role in supporting health workforce availability, accessibility, quality, and sustainability, while promoting patient safety. This review aimed to identify evidence on the design, delivery and effectiveness of HPR to inform policy decisions....

Several global challenges have emerged and coalesced in recent times, including climate change and environmental crises; growing health and social inequalities; geopolitical conflicts; and increasing rates of both communicable and noncommunicable and mental health diseases. The urgency and need for change has never been greater. In response, gover...

The importance of health systems has been reinforced by the commitment of Low- and Middle-Income Countries (L&MICs) to pursue the targets of Universal Health Coverage, Health Security, and to achieve Health-related Sustainable Development Goals. The COVID-19 pandemic has further exposed the fragility of health systems in countries of all income gro...

Background: In addition to promoting patient safety, health practitioner regulation (HPR) systems are increasingly recognized as playing an important role in supporting health workforce availability, accessibility, quality, and sustainability. This review aimed to identify the evidence on the design, delivery and effectiveness of HPR systems to inf...

China implemented the first phase of its National Healthy Cities pilot program from 2016-20. Along with related urban health governmental initiatives, the program has helped put health on the agenda of local governments while raising public awareness. Healthy City actions taken at the municipal scale also prepared cities to deal with the COVID-19 p...

Governance is an important factor in urban health, and law is an important element of healthy governance. Law can be an intervention local government wields to influence behavior and shape environments. Law can also be an important target of health promotion efforts: Law and the enforcement and implementation behaviors it fosters can promote unheal...

Background Health workforce governance has been proposed as key to improving health services delivery, yet few studies have examined the conceptualisation of health workforce governance in detail and exploration in literature remains limited. Methods A literature review using PubMed, Google Scholar and grey literature search was conducted to map o...

Foresight methodologies enable individuals and organizations to envision different future scenarios and plan for greater future resilience. However, foresight is an underused methodology in the Western Pacific region for health policy development that could be extremely beneficial, among other areas, in the context of public health emergency respon...

Twelve years have now passed since the influential WHO Report on the Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) in 2008. A group of senior international public health scholars and decision-makers met in Italy in mid-2019 to review the legacy of the SDoH conceptual framework and its adequacy for the many challenges facing our field as we enter the 2020s....

Rethinking Society for the 21st Century - by International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP) July 2018

This chapter focuses on the design of and research about policy interventions that positively alter health behaviour. This includes healthcare policies as well as intersectoral policies that influence health. It begins with a broad examination of what constitutes health policy, the process of making policy and the pertinence of health policy to beh...

The WHO launched a Global Action Plan on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in 2015. World leaders in the G7, G20 and the UN General Assembly have declared AMR to be a global crisis. World leaders have also adopted universal health coverage (UHC) as a key target under the sustainable development goals. This paper argues that neither initiative is likel...

Background China has the largest absolute number of people living with hepatitis B with up to 300,000 people estimated to die each year from hepatitis B related diseases. Despite advances in immunisation, clinical management, and health policy, there is still a lack of accessible and affordable health care for people with hepatitis B. Through in-de...

Adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) build on the lessons learned from the Millennium Development Goals that had guided development efforts for the preceding 15 years. The World Health Organization (WHO) Western Pacific Region made remarkable progress towards the Millennium Developm...

We look at local government health planning as a governance challenge, rather than a mere technocratic endeavour in the hands of civil servants and bureaucrats. Planning is about the journey in policy development and implementation. We review planning history and types, and hinge the current status quo of the field on efforts in community developme...

Globally, the provision of clean and safe drinking water to most populations has been an elusive development goal though some of us take the availability of this vital resource for granted. Millennium Development Goals (MDG) target 7.C is the target, which addresses sustainability and access to water, among other developmental goals. As the precedi...

Although some areas of clinical health care are becoming adept at implementing continuous quality improvement (CQI) projects, there has been limited experimentation of CQI in health promotion. In this study, we examined the impact of a CQI intervention on health promotion in four Australian Indigenous primary health care centers. Our study objectiv...

The use of gender-sensitive indicators is a critical component in the effort for effective gender mainstreaming. Gender mainstreaming was endorsed to promote equity between women and men at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, and more recently, in 2006, in a resolution of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC, 2006). Internat...

This paper reports on an evaluation of a national action learning set for health policy managers from three Australian state/territory health authorities, conducted during 2010–2011. We collected and analysed qualitative data about the major problems the participants encountered in their work, their experiences of the learning set and their percept...

This article examines policy capacity in the context of Australian health authorities in relation to the challenges confronting policy workers and senior managers in these agencies. The article reports the challenges identified by our informants in relation to political structures, roles and responsibilities of other portfolios and governments, int...

People with chronic conditions who are often in contact with the health-care system are well placed to reflect on how services meet their needs. Some research characterizes people who use complementary and alternative medicines (CAMs) as a distinct group who opt out of the mainstream health system. However, many CAM users are people with chronic or...

This study aimed to evaluate the effects of a case management program for diabetics, using a pre-post comparison design. The study population comprised 6007 diabetics who received case management intervention in 2006 and were sampled nationwide in Korea. Before and after the intervention, the study population answered questions regarding their know...

Globally, the provision of clean and safe drinking water to most populations has been an elusive development goal though some of us take the availability of this vital resource for granted. Millennium Development Goals (MDG) target 7.C is the target, which addresses sustainability and access to water, among other developmental goals. As the precedi...

The diversity of health systems around the world points to the path- dependency nature of health policies (Immergut, 1992; Tuohy, 1999). Given a complex array of political, economic, social, and institutional forces at work at any point in time, there are decisions which are made at critical juncture points (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012) what shape...

Patients' Responses to Knowledge about Diabetes

Patients' Responses to Nutrition Management Test Items (Unit: %)

Objectives To understand the extent to which conventional and complementary health care are integrated for CAM users with chronic conditions.Methods In-depth interviews and a self-administered questionnaire were used to collect data on care-seeking, self-management and CAM use among people with type 2 diabetes and/or cardiovascular disease living i...

This study is to estimate the effectiveness of a diabetic case management programme on health-care service utilization. The study population included 6007 as the intervention group and 956 766 as the control group. As the indicators of health-care service utilization, numbers of medical ambulatory consultations, days of medication prescribed and me...

Drawing on the expertise of Chinese and Western academics and practitioners, the contributors to this volume aim to advance the understanding of philanthropy for health in China in the 20th century and to identify future challenges and opportunities. Considering government, NGO leaders, domestic philanthropists, and foreign foundations, the volume...

Funds to developing countries for HIV/AIDS programmes have noticeably increased. For civil society organisations (CSOs), one challenge of project implementation is the difficulty in assessing their interventions. A qualitative study was conducted in Malaysia and the Philippines with CSOs to identify the obstacles to HIV project evaluation. Twenty-f...

Introduction: Wajir County is part of Kenya’s arid land in North Eastern Kenya and has a population of approximately 662,000 (2009 census). The County’s main water supply is from underground shallow wells, and for long, sanitation options have been restricted to open defection and bucket latrines due to susceptibility of the shallow aquifer to cont...

Background: Childhood vaccination (also described as immunisation) is an important and effective way to reduce childhood illness and death. However, there are many children who do not receive the recommended vaccines because their parents do not know why vaccination is important, do not understand how, where or when to get their children vaccinate...

A scan of health challenges around the globe readily brings to mind a range of infectious illnesses, from HIV to influenza. Yet chronic non-contagious conditions--heart disease, asthma, diabetes, cancer--are more prevalent, and their rates soaring, across the developed and developing worlds. The Global Handbook on Noncommunicable Diseases and Heal...

Background Vaccination is a cost-effective public health measure and is central to the Millennium Development Goal of reducing child mortality. However, childhood vaccination coverage remains sub-optimal in many settings. While communication is a key feature of vaccination programmes, we are not aware of any comprehensive approach to organising the...