Review Article Open Access Health Care: Current Reviews H e a l t h C a r e : C u r r e n t R e v i e w s ISSN: 2375-4273 Soliman et al., Health Care Current Reviews 2017, 5:1 DOI: 10.4172/2375-4273.1000191 Volume 5 • Issue 1 • 1000191 Health Care Current Reviews, an open access journal ISSN:2375-4273 Abstract Health care and education should be delivered to everyone as rightful services with a moral motive evolving form the fact that they are basic human rights and not commodities. Services are attainable rights, while commodities are only delivered or become of better quality when someone pays for them. Being labelled as rightful services, healthcare and education cannot be owned. And that is the right policy for health and education reform, because if they were owned as commodities, it would be easy to control them and limit their delivery based on affordability. The delivery of healthcare and educational services as rightful services has humanistic, economic and developmental implications. From a hu- manistic standpoint, healthcare and education should be delivered as basic human rights, and not as gifts or privileges that are granted to people with terms and conditions. Also, the concept of delivering healthcare and education from an economical versus commercial point of view will lead to the delivery of more services with lower costs, thus increasing access to these services and leading to more productivity and overall economic positive output. Consequently, this would have a developmental implication, where the performance of individuals who receive their basic human rights would tremendously improve as a result of being healthy and well-educated. These concepts have actually been prac- tically applied at the Children’s Cancer Hospital – 57357 Egypt which treats children with cancer free of charge and implements continuous learning and education for its patients and employees as rightful services. The hospital sets an example for health policy planning and implementation as a role model towards healthcare reform in low and middle income countries. Keywords: Healthcare; Education; Service; Basic right; Commodity Introduction Over the years, there has been great concern with reforming the health care system all over the globe while controlling costs [1]. Many initiatives have been implemented to restructure the health systems to improve quality and access to health care and a lot of funds have been invested and raised for this cause [1]. However, one fatal faw exists in the health systems where the delivery of health care is more or less attributed to symptoms of one core problem; health care is dealt with as if it were a commodity like many other commodities [2]. Whereas, the basic conceptions regarding health and healthcare should be revolutionized to deal with healthcare services as a right and not a privilege [2]. “Health and health care are not commodities that exist to drive the economy. Tey are among the social goals which we have an economy to achieve” [3]. It has been the consensus of the world that health care is a human right, as declared by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN and as stated by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which recognizes "the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health" [4]. Te notion that health care is a basic human right is also deep-rooted in the Declaration of Independence regarding what actually defnes a right to be [5]. However, this is easier said than done and these concepts have not totally been translated into health policy implementation. Te U.S. Senator, Ted Kennedy expressed the feelings of many in regards to health care mentioning that health care is not a gif to be rationed based on the ability to pay, and that it should no longer be considered as a commodity nor a privilege for those who can aford it [6]. However, health care is a basic right that should be attainable to everybody through universal health insurance which is a national priority [6]. Te same concept goes for education, where it should be made attainable to everybody as a basic human right regardless of people’s afordability to pay for it [7]. Te purpose of this Delivering Healthcare and Education as Rightful Services not Commodities: A Noble Cause with Great Practical Implications at Children’s Cancer Hospital – 57357 Egypt Soliman R*, Eweida W, Zamzam M and Abouelnaga S Children’s Cancer Hospital Egypt, Egypt *Corresponding author: Ranin Soliman, Assistant Chief Operating Offcer, Children’s Hospital Egypt (57357 Hospital), Egypt, Tel: +201003263399; E-mail: raninmagdi@hotmail.com Received January 25, 2017; Accepted March 21, 2017; Published March 28, 2017 Citation: Soliman R, Eweida W, Zamzam M, Abouelnaga S (2017) Delivering Healthcare and Education as Rightful Services not Commodities: A Noble Cause with Great Practical Implications at Children’s Cancer Hospital – 57357 Egypt. Health Care Current Reviews 5: 191. doi: 10.4172/2375-4273.1000191 Copyright: © 2017 Soliman R, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. concept paper is to rationalize the importance of delivering healthcare and education as rightful services not as commodities, and the implications of applying these concepts on humanistic, economic, and developmental standpoints. Te paper also provides a real-life practical example as a case study where the implementation of these concepts achieved tremendous success at the Children’s Cancer Hospital – 57357 Egypt. Materials and Methods A systematic qualitative literature review was done for sources whose focus was on addressing whether healthcare and education should be delivered as basic rights or commodities. Key words included in the search were healthcare, education, service, basic right, and commodity. Tis was followed by qualitatively refecting on the authors’ point of views regarding these conceptual questions and analyzing the impacts of applying healthcare and education as services to come up with new concepts and implications. Full-text papers or online articles were excluded if they did not provide sufcient evidence about the data source, or they addressed an irrelevant topic. Te applicability of these concepts were then evaluated at the Children’s Cancer Hospital – 57357