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A critical interpretive synthesis of informal payments in maternal health care

Informal payments for healthcare are widely acknowledged as undercutting health care access, but empirical research is somewhat limited. This article is a critical interpretive synthesis that summarizes the evidence base on the drivers and impact of informal payments in maternal health care and crit...

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Autores principales: Schaaf, Marta, Topp, Stephanie M
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6528746/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30903167
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/heapol/czz003
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author Schaaf, Marta
Topp, Stephanie M
author_facet Schaaf, Marta
Topp, Stephanie M
author_sort Schaaf, Marta
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description Informal payments for healthcare are widely acknowledged as undercutting health care access, but empirical research is somewhat limited. This article is a critical interpretive synthesis that summarizes the evidence base on the drivers and impact of informal payments in maternal health care and critically interrogates the paradigms that are used to describe informal payments. Studies and conceptual articles identified both proximate and systems drivers of informal payments. These include norms of gift giving, health workforce scarcity, inadequate health systems financing, the extent of formal user fees, structural adjustment and the marketization of health care, and patient willingness to pay for better care. Similarly, there are proximal and distal impacts, including on household finances, patient satisfaction and provider morale. Informal payments have been studied and addressed from a variety of different perspectives, including anti-corruption, ethnographic and other in-depth qualitative approaches and econometric modelling. Summarizing and discussing the advantages and disadvantages of these and other paradigms illustrates the value of an inter-disciplinary approach. The same tacit, hidden attributes that make informal payments hard to measure also make them hard to discuss and address. A multidisciplinary health systems approach that leverages and integrates positivist, interpretivist and constructivist tools of social science research can lead to better insight. With this, we can challenge ‘master narratives’ and meet universalistic, equity-oriented global health objectives.
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spelling pubmed-65287462019-05-28 A critical interpretive synthesis of informal payments in maternal health care Schaaf, Marta Topp, Stephanie M Health Policy Plan Reviews Informal payments for healthcare are widely acknowledged as undercutting health care access, but empirical research is somewhat limited. This article is a critical interpretive synthesis that summarizes the evidence base on the drivers and impact of informal payments in maternal health care and critically interrogates the paradigms that are used to describe informal payments. Studies and conceptual articles identified both proximate and systems drivers of informal payments. These include norms of gift giving, health workforce scarcity, inadequate health systems financing, the extent of formal user fees, structural adjustment and the marketization of health care, and patient willingness to pay for better care. Similarly, there are proximal and distal impacts, including on household finances, patient satisfaction and provider morale. Informal payments have been studied and addressed from a variety of different perspectives, including anti-corruption, ethnographic and other in-depth qualitative approaches and econometric modelling. Summarizing and discussing the advantages and disadvantages of these and other paradigms illustrates the value of an inter-disciplinary approach. The same tacit, hidden attributes that make informal payments hard to measure also make them hard to discuss and address. A multidisciplinary health systems approach that leverages and integrates positivist, interpretivist and constructivist tools of social science research can lead to better insight. With this, we can challenge ‘master narratives’ and meet universalistic, equity-oriented global health objectives. Oxford University Press 2019-04 2019-03-21 /pmc/articles/PMC6528746/ /pubmed/30903167 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/heapol/czz003 Text en © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press in association with The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com
spellingShingle Reviews
Schaaf, Marta
Topp, Stephanie M
A critical interpretive synthesis of informal payments in maternal health care
title A critical interpretive synthesis of informal payments in maternal health care
title_full A critical interpretive synthesis of informal payments in maternal health care
title_fullStr A critical interpretive synthesis of informal payments in maternal health care
title_full_unstemmed A critical interpretive synthesis of informal payments in maternal health care
title_short A critical interpretive synthesis of informal payments in maternal health care
title_sort critical interpretive synthesis of informal payments in maternal health care
topic Reviews
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6528746/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30903167
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/heapol/czz003
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