Document Type : Correspondence
Authors
1 Department of Sustainable Health, Campus Fryslân, University of Groningen, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands
2 School of Social Sciences, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Attika, Greece
3 Faculty of Health Sciences, School of Medicine, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
Keywords
Decentralisation has always been a key element of health systems strengthening; even back to 1978, the World Health Organization (WHO) Alma Ata Declaration clearly stated that the provision of fair, equal, and accessible healthcare should be decentralised and rooted in community-based approaches.1 However, decentralisation is not a uniform group of policies. On the contrary, it consists of a heterogeneous set of reforms aiming to the transfer of administrative, political and/or economic power from central governments to subnational authorities.2 In this sense decentralisation is not a synonym to fiscal decentralisation, nor the former necessarily entails the latter. ...(Read more...)