When: Wednesday, March 20, 2024, 5:30 PM - 7:00 PMWhere: 3.20 ArtsTwo, QMUL Mile End Road London E1 4NS, Mile End
CEREES Book Discussion with author Dr Tamara Popic (SPIR, QMUL) Discussants: Dr Eleanor Brooks (Edinburgh) and Dr Allan Sikk (SSEES, UCL).
Health Reforms in Post-Communist Eastern Europe analyses healthcare reforms pathways in the post-communist context. Combining insights from comparative politics and social policy analysis, it examines the politics of health reforms in Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Poland over the three transitional decades, from 1989 to 2019.
The book argues that the post-communist transformation of healthcare policy entailed policy learning, an endogenous process of policy change. This process was driven by ideas rooted in the belief that market mechanisms such as competition and privatisation would solve the problems of the healthcare system, yielding higher efficiency and better allocation of resources. The market ideas emerged already under communism and pathways taken by different countries away from communist-era healthcare system have been shaped by a series of reform initiatives aimed at adapting these ideas in healthcare provision. The success of these initiatives has been influenced by three factors: policy legacies, political competition, and institutional configurations. By challenging dominant views of the post-communist welfare transition, the book offers a novel approach to comparative analysis of health reforms in the region, as well as policy changes more generally.
Dr Tamara Popic is a Senior Lecturer in Social/Public Policy at the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include the politics of health, public opinion on health systems, and political communication in the context of health reforms.
Discussants: Dr Eleanor Brooks (School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh) and Dr Allan Sikk (School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London)
17.30 - 18.00 Author’s talk
18.00 - 18.30 Discussants’ comments (15 min each)
18.30 - 19.00 Q&A
19.00 – 20.00 Drinks reception, meet the author