Quantity versus quality; low-paid emloyees; patterns of recruitment; material resources; the missing generalist; entrepreneurial medicine; doctors and administration; matters of life and death. Appendices: supply of doctors by Union republics, 1986; medical and pharmaceutical higher educational establishments; nomenclature of health service institutions; causes of death in the USSR by age and sex in 1985, per 100,000 population.

Looking at health service institutions in the Soviet Union, this book looks particularly at the role of doctors and their recruitment, pay and administrative duties. The book also studies entrepreneurial medicine, material resources and the decline of the general practitioner.