This volume explores the nature of health and health-care experiences in Russia by comparing societies and communities with different socio-cultural conditions. The unique use of longitudinal data collected over ten years, allows the authors to address key questions on Russians individual experiences of health care and their understanding of its influencing factors. They explore the methods of self treatment and illness prevention in combination with the effects poverty and treatment availability can have on the standards of living for the people surveyed. This pertinent issue follows a time of rapidly worsening health status amongst the Russian population and a grave decline in male life expectancy. The findings are set within the context of experience from Finland and the UK, allowing the authors to explore the challenge of the Russian health-care crisis to Western European models of health status and health care.

Autorentext

Nick Manning is Professor of Social Policy and Sociology at the University of Nottingham, UK. Nataliya Tikhonova is Professor at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia. They are the editors of two companion volumes: Poverty and Social Exclusion in the New Russia (2004) and (with Ovsey Shkaratan) Work and Welfare in the New Russia (2000).