Protecting the health of the poor: Social Movements in the South

Despite the colossal amount of spending on health and healthcare programmes globally, why do massive inequalities in health remain, both within and between countries? Drawing on in-depth empirical research spanning Asia, Latin America and Africa, this path-breaking collection offers an overview of the legal, political and social factors behind the poor performance of countries in the Global South in enforcing the right to health. In doing so, it argues that governments and NGOs should unite to set a comprehensive agenda for a fight against poverty and for protecting the health of the poor. Bringing together fresh perspectives from critically engaged scholars, Protecting the Health of the Poor makes a compelling case for the need to re-evaluate how we approach healthcare in developing countries at a global, national and local level.Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) at the University of BergenpublishedVersio

Abstract Discrete Optimization Algorithms for single machine total tardiness scheduling with sequence dependent setups

We consider the problem of scheduling a single machine to minimize total tardiness with sequence dependent setup times. We present two algorithms, a problem space-based local search heuristic and a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) for this problem. With respect to GRASP, our main contributions are—a new cost function in the construction phase, a new variation of Variable Neighborhood Search in the improvement phase, and Path Relinking using three different search neighborhoods. The problem space-based local search heuristic incorporates local search with respect to both the problem space and the solution space. We compare our algorithms with Simulated Annealing, Genetic Search, Pairwise Interchange, Branch and Bound and Ant Colony Search on a set of test problems from literature, showing that the algorithms perform very competitively. Ó 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Lifting Cover Inequalities for the Binary Knapsack Polytope

We consider the family of facets of the binary knapsack polytope from minimal covers. We study previous results on sequential lifting in a unifying framework and explore a class of most violated fractional lifted cover inequalities, defined by Balas and Zemel, which are more general than traditional simple lifted cover inequalities. We investigate some theoretical properties of these inequalities, propose two separation algorithms and illustrate these using several examples

Who defines-who decides? : theorising the epistemic communities, communities of practice and interest groups in the healthcare field : a discursive approach

The aim of the paper is to propose a rethinking of the concept of epistemic communities in terms of their application in the discursive analysis of the field of healthcare. In the first part of the article, authors describe healthcare in the light of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, and then the knowledge-power relations are presented in the discourses in the field. It serves to propose a relational approach to the various discursive actions generated by the three groups-epistemic communities, communities of practice and interest groups which are distinguished analytically from each other. Authors conclude by illustrating a possible way of operationalization of the proposed categories using the examples of discursive actions in the healthcare field in Poland