Indispensable reference work on French health system

A new comprehensive review of the French health system has been published as part of the "Health Systems in Transition" series from the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies. It can be downloaded as a .pdf at a WHO site. The review is a full 294 pages long and is a very useful reference document for anyone trying to follow health policy in France.

The document was authored by my colleagues at EHESP, Karine Chevreul and Isabele Durand-Zaleski along with Stephane Barhami, Cristina Hernández-Quevedo and Philipa Mladovsky. Dr. Chevreul is the deputy head of the Paris Health Economics and Health Services Research Unit and a researcher in the Public Health Department of the Henri Mondor Teaching Hospital in Créteil and Dr. Durand-Zaleski is the director of those units. Both teach in the EHESP policy modules.

The volume provides a good review of recent policy changes in France that touch on health and health care. The following figure from the book gives a sense of the relative "outputs" of the French health system compared to the OECD average.