Different Health Care Systems — Different Conditions? A Comparative Perspective

In this chapter, we aim to set the context of the delivery of health care in an international context. The international context is central to an understanding of the nature of health care systems and has a profound but uneven effect on health care work and workers, whether they be highly skilled or low paid. The chapter takes the three countries, the UK, the US and Nigeria, and considers their different health care systems. It also draws on macro-data to examine health care rankings through a comparative lens and takes into account key health care indicators including health spending as a share of GDP and ratios of doctors to patients. The chapter then turns to a discussion of the international health care workforce and introduces macro-data to demonstrate the importance of IMG and foreign-trained nurses to the UK and the US medical workforce. However, in a different vein, the chapter begins by using the recent debate on US and UK health care to illustrate the ideological differences between the two systems as interpreted by political and patient commentators.