The Fund's International Program in Health Policy and Practice is dedicated to building an international network of policy-oriented health care researchers. As part of that work, the program conducts high-level policy forums for international exchange, which foster creative thinking about health care problems common to the United States and other industrialized countries.
For the past six years, the Fund has hosted an annual international symposium in health care policy on a topic of common concern to the United States and other industrialized nations. This year's symposium, held in Washington, D.C., in October 2003, brought together leading policy thinkers to consider the theme "Hospitals and Health Care Delivery Systems: Spotlight on Innovation." Participants included health ministers or their designates from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, other experts from each country, and leading U.S. policymakers and researchers.
At an opening dinner at historic Blair House, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy G. Thompson highlighted several challenges shared by the health care systems of the participating countries: reconciling rising health care costs with public demand for expensive new technologies and pharmaceuticals, meeting the needs of aging societies, and changing the population's lifestyle to combat growing epidemics of obesity and diabetes. He commended the efforts of the Global Fund for AIDS and underscored the value of forums such as the symposium for cross-national learning, emphasizing that collaboration for better health can be a bridge to peace between countries.
In the opening keynote address, New Zealand Minister of Health Annette King articulated a vision for the New Zealand health care system and outlined major reforms underway to improve quality and reduce disparities, re-focus the health care system on primary care and prevention, and control the growth in pharmaceutical costs. In subsequent plenary sessions, Martin McKee of the European Observatory drew on examples from many countries to illustrate the need to re-engineer 1960s models of health care delivery to serve growing numbers of chronically ill patients and shift care from the hospital to the community. Chris Ham, director of the strategy unit of the U.K. Department of Health, presented a comparison of utilization and organization in Kaiser Permanente and the National Health Service, provoking a discussion of the role of incentives and cultural context in health care systems. (1) The theme of organizational culture as a driver of change was continued in a dynamic exchange among Robert Roswell, M.D., undersecretary of health for the U.S. Veterans Health Administration, George Halvorson, chairman and CEO of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, and Simon Stevens, senior health policy adviser to U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. A highlight of the meeting was the second John M. Eisenberg, M.D., International Lecture, delivered by David Naylor, M.D., dean of the faculty of medicine at the University of Toronto, on Toronto's experience with SARS and the need for international collaboration and investment in public health infrastructure.
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