Medicine & Healthcare

The series of publications entitled “Freiburger Schriften zur Finanzwissenschaft und Wirtschaftspolitik” (“Freiburg Publications on Finance and Economic Policy”) publishes papers from the pre-eminent fields of economics research, which are also rich in tradition, at the University of Freiburg. The array of subjects which these analyses address ranges from the pension system and employment policy, education policy, demography, European and international governance, fiscal sustainability, federalism, healthcare policy, real estate economics, migration, tax and performance-based competition, the causes and effects of transnational conflicts, violence, crime, terror and corruption to behavioural economics and satisfaction research. These studies approach problems from both a theoretical perspective as well as using a selection of econometric, experimental or qualitative research methods. What links them is that they all address both political and social as well as topical academic issues. Their authors’ common, overarching goal is to provide well-founded recommendations on using their findings in politico-economic consulting and to help implement them.

Health communication is a field of research which deals with the social conditions, consequences and significance of communication that is related and relevant to health, both intentional and unintentional, interpersonal, media-related and public. The field of health communication, which emerged in Britain and the US several decades ago, has established itself in German-speaking countries in recent years and yielded a vast number of studies on the interplay between health, illness and communication. The series contains up-to-date studies in German or English which are devoted to this subject area and which consider communication and health from a communication studies perspective.

Our healthcare system is being confronted with fundamental moral and political challenges which affect its basic focus and character, such as persistent and controversial discussions on approaches to health and illness, matters of principle related to fairness and solidarity, medical utopias and dystopias, corruption and ethical questions, the debate about professional identity and commercialization, and the relationship between economics and medicine, to name but a few. This interdisciplinary series of publications encourages the reader to consider fundamental issues related to healthcare. It transcends not only basic medical ethics but also legal, political and economic issues.