Suchergebnisse

Informal patient payments are deeply rooted in Central and Eastern European countries. Despite the socio-political changes in the health care sectors after 1990s and the subsequent health care reforms, informal payments for health care services continue to serve patients` and physicians` interests. These payments also fill gaps in health care funding in this European region. Nevertheless, unofficial payments are not a desirable payment channel. They lack transparency and distort the efficiency and equity in health care provision. Still, the successful elimination of these payments will depend on the public attitude towards these payments. This study aims to compare public attitudes towards informal patient payments and payment experience in six Central and Eastern European: Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine. The data have been collected in 2010 in nation-wide representative surveys using an identical standardized question- naire administrated via face-to-face interviews. We have collected about 1000 questionnaires in each country. The results show that a major group of respondents in each country expresses a negative attitude towards both informal cash payments and in-kind gifts. 208, 187, and 174 respondents paid informally for out-patient service in Ukraine, Romania, and Hungary respectively. We also analyse the relation between public attitudes and respondents` past experience with informal payments, e.g. whether they have paid informally payment for out-patient service used last year. In Bulgaria and Poland, negative attitude is mostly observed among those who have not paid informally. The existence of positive and indifferent attitudes towards informal pay- ments as reported in our study, indicates a challenge for policy makers in Central and Eastern European countries. The acceptance of government initiatives aimed at the elimination of informal payments will largely depend on the governments` ability to create a social resistance towards these payments.

The Bulgarian-English parallel corpus MaCoCu-bg-en 1.0 was built by crawling the ".bg" and ".бг" internet top-level domains in 2021, extending the crawl dynamically to other domains as well. All the crawling process was carried out by the MaCoCu crawler (https://github.com/macocu/MaCoCu-crawler). Websites containing documents in both target languages were identified and processed using the tool Bitextor (https://github.com/bitextor/bitextor). Considerable efforts were devoted into cleaning the extracted text to provide a high-quality parallel corpus. This was achieved by removing boilerplate and near-duplicated paragraphs and documents that are not in one of the targeted languages. Document and segment alignment as implemented in Bitextor were carried out, and BicleanerAI (https://github.com/bitextor/bicleaner-ai) and Bifixer (https://github.com/bitextor/bifixer) were used for fixing, cleaning, and deduplicating the final version of the corpus. While the TXT format consists solely of pairs of source and target segments (one or several sentences), each segment pair in the TMX format is accompanied by the following metadata: - source and target document URL; - quality score as provided by the tool BicleanerAI; - translation direction identification: the source segment in each segment pair was identified by using a probabilistic model; - personal information identification ("biroamer-entities"): segments containing personal information are flagged, so final users of the corpus can decide whether to use these segments; - language variants: the language variant of English (British or American) was identified for every segment pair on document and domain level. Notice and take down: Should you consider that our data contains material that is owned by you and should therefore not be reproduced here, please: (1) Clearly identify yourself, with detailed contact data such as an address, telephone number or email address at which you can be contacted. (2) Clearly identify the copyrighted work claimed to be infringed. (3) Clearly identify the material that is claimed to be infringing and information reasonably sufficient in order to allow us to locate the material. (4) Please write to the contact person for this resource whose email is available in the full item record. We will comply with legitimate requests by removing the affected sources from the next release of the corpus. This action has received funding from the European Union's Connecting Europe Facility 2014-2020 - CEF Telecom, under Grant Agreement No. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2020/2278341. This communication reflects only the author's view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.