Project on healthcare reforms in East Central Europe.

Monika Ewa Kaminska has been awarded a four year M8 Independent Postdoctoral Position within the Excellence Initiative to carry out her research project "Healthcare reforms and state desertion in East-Central Europe: privatizing healthcare, privatizing risks".

The project comparatively analyses healthcare reforms in East-Central Europe (ECE). It sets to identify the triggers behind risk-privatization trends in ECE healthcare and explain variation in "state desertion" levels across the region, and explores modes of institutional change (abrupt vs. incremental). It examines the social impact of healthcare reforms by bringing into focus patients’ and health workers’ perspectives and studying the stratifying effects of ‘re-commodification’ and privatization of ECE healthcare systems. Finally, it embeds the healthcare systems in the political economy models.

The sample consists of eight post-communist countries: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia. The analysis covers the twenty five years of post-communist transition (1989-2014).

The project applies a synthetic analytical framework combining a neoinstitutional approach with an analysis of domestic tranformative agency and external influence, and combines qualitative and quantitative data analysis.


Contact:
Dr. Monika Ewa Kaminska
SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58639
E-Mail: m.e.kaminska@uni-bremen.de