Contemporary specificities of labour in the health care sector: introductory notes for discussion
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BioMed Central
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Contemporary specificities of labour in the health care sector: introductory notes for discussion Francisco Eduardo Campos*1 and Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque2 Address: 1Center of Study of Collective Health, School of Medicine, Federal University of Minas Gerais (NESCON, UFMG), Minas Gerais, Brazil and 2Center of Regional Development and Planning, Department of Economics, Federal University of Minas Gerais (CEDEPLAR-UFMG), Minas Gerais, Brazil Email: Francisco Eduardo Campos* - [email protected]; Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 18 August 2005 Human Resources for Health 2005, 3:8
doi:10.1186/1478-4491-3-8
Received: 20 October 2004 Accepted: 18 August 2005
This article is available from: http://www.human-resources-health.com/content/3/1/8 © 2005 Campos and Albuquerque; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract Background: This paper combines the literature on public health, on economics of health and on economics of technological innovation to discuss the peculiarities of labour in the health care sector. Method and framework: The starting point is the investigation of the economic peculiarities of medical care. Results and discussions: This investigation leads to the identification of the prevalence of nonmarket forms of medical care in the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Furthermore, the health care system has a distinctive characteristic from other economic sectors: it is the intersection between social welfare and innovation systems. The relationship between technological innovation and cost in the health care sector is surveyed. Finally, the Brazilian case is discussed as an example of a developing country. Conclusion: The peculiarities of labour in the health care sector suggest the need to recognize the worth of sectoral labour and to cease to treat it separately. This process should take into account the rapid development of the health innovation system and one important consequence: the obsolescence of the acquired knowledge. One way to dignify labour is to implement continued education and training of health professions personnel.
Background Labour in the health care sector has specific characteristics that are evidenced by its institutional organization. The special economic properties of medical care determine the generalized emergence of what is called "market failures" in the economic literature. That is, the operation of market forces alone is not sufficient for the working of this sector, as is recognized in a recent report of the World Bank [1]. Society constructs varied institutional forms in order to offset market flaws by assigning an essential role
to non-market institution
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