Health policy research touches on current issues in health policy and social security. These studies assess the social costs of common chronic conditions and functional limitations, as well as the dental care reform, which is also the subject of an oral health examination survey.
Subprojects of health policy studies
The social costs of public health problems and functional limitations
This project assesses the social costs of important public health problems and their distribution by disease group and funding party. The study also makes calculations determining whether preventive measures help reduce health care costs.
The demand for dental care, and dental insurance
Based on the Health 2000 survey and complementary surveys, this project is conducted in cooperation with the Social Insurance Institution of Finland (KELA) and examines the oral health of adults, the use of and demand for dental care services in the period before publicly subsidised adult dental care was expanded to all age groups. In order to assess the impact, monitoring data was gathered during 2003 and will be gathered again during 2004.
The efficacy of psychotherapy
This is a long-term experimental project initiated by the Social Insurance Institution of Finland. In parallel with the gathering of follow-up data, the analysis and reporting phase is currently underway. A description of the implementation and first research results has been published in 2004.
Personal doctor experiment
This experiment has shown that when supported by specialist consultants, private and health centre based personal doctors (family doctors) can produce high-quality services at the same cost as doctors in traditional salaried positions working in health centres. During this experiment, the socio-economic differences in service use and user satisfaction were almost completely evened out.