%0 Journal Article
%T Contemporary specificities of labour in the health care sector: introductory notes for discussion
%A Francisco Campos
%A Eduardo Albuquerque
%J Human Resources for Health
%D 2005
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1478-4491-3-8
%X The starting point is the investigation of the economic peculiarities of medical care.This investigation leads to the identification of the prevalence of non-market forms of medical care in the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Furthermore, the health care system has a distinctive characteristic from other economic sectors: it is the intersection between social welfare and innovation systems. The relationship between technological innovation and cost in the health care sector is surveyed. Finally, the Brazilian case is discussed as an example of a developing country.The peculiarities of labour in the health care sector suggest the need to recognize the worth of sectoral labour and to cease to treat it separately. This process should take into account the rapid development of the health innovation system and one important consequence: the obsolescence of the acquired knowledge. One way to dignify labour is to implement continued education and training of health professions personnel.Labour in the health care sector has specific characteristics that are evidenced by its institutional organization. The special economic properties of medical care determine the generalized emergence of what is called "market failures" in the economic literature. That is, the operation of market forces alone is not sufficient for the working of this sector, as is recognized in a recent report of the World Bank [1]. Society constructs varied institutional forms in order to offset market flaws by assigning an essential role to non-market institutions to render adequate services. The welfare state institutions may be viewed as an expression of social attempts to offset generalized market failures in the health care sector.The next section of this paper presents the method of investigating the economic peculiarities of medical care as the starting point of this paper. The economic literature extensively discusses this subject, and the theoretical
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