Accessed 22nd March 2019.
Promoting and protecting health is essential to human welfare and sustained economic and social development. This was recognized more than 30 years ago by the Alma-Ata Declaration signatories, who noted that Health for All would contribute
both to a better quality of life and also to global peace a...nd security
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This technical note provides tailored advice on further adjustments in health financing policy in the context of war based on principles of universal health coverage, solidarity and equity.
It summarizes international evidence and accounts for specific features of health financing reform in Ukraine....
The primary focus will be on short-term adjustments and to a lesser extent on medium-term measures.
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Africa is off track to reach the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 and lags behind in building resilient health systems
and health security, against a backdrop of limited resources. The world envisaged a significant role for governments
in funding the Sustainable Development Agenda, but inadeq...uate funding for health in African countries is
persistent, despite additional continental commitments to address the problem. When commitments to global health
targets and available fiscal space do not align, innovation is warranted.
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Annual and medium-term budget preparation processes are the platforms through which specific plans are transformed into actual resource allocation decisions. The aim of this Process Guide is to support key stakeholders involved in these processes (such as the Cabinet, Ministries of Finance and Healt...h, the Parliament, citizens, media, and civil society organizations) to reorient budgetary arrangements in order to facilitate the ability of national governments to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic by delivering, therapeutics, diagnostics, and vaccine services to their populations. Reorienting budgetary arrangements positions governments to sustain the capacity to mitigate and respond to COVID-19 while concurrently delivering other essential health services and working towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC). The reorientation process is an opportunity to better align budgetary arrangements to sustain systemic capacity to prevent emerging health threats over the short, medium, and long terms.
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Background
The ambitious development agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires substantial investments across several sectors, including for SDG 3 (healthy lives and wellbeing). No estimates of the additional resources needed to strengthen comprehensive health service delivery to...wards the attainment of SDG 3 and universal health coverage in low-income and middle-income countries have been published.
Methods
We developed a framework for health systems strengthening, within which population-level and individual-level health service coverage is gradually scaled up over time. We developed projections for 67 low-income and middle-income countries from 2016 to 2030, representing 95% of the total population in low-income and middle-income countries. We considered four service delivery platforms, and modelled two scenarios with differing levels of ambition: a progress scenario, in which countries’ advancement towards global targets is constrained by their health system’s assumed absorptive capacity, and an ambitious scenario, in which most countries attain the global targets. We estimated the associated costs and health effects, including reduced prevalence of illness, lives saved, and increases in life expectancy. We projected available funding by country and year, taking into account economic growth and anticipated allocation towards the health sector, to allow for an analysis of affordability and financial sustainability.
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Background
How to finance progress towards universal health coverage in low-income and middle-income countries is a subject of intense debate. We investigated how alternative tax systems aff ect the breadth, depth, and height of health system coverage.
Methods
We used cross-national longitudin...al fi xed eff ects models to assess the relationships between total and diff erent types of tax revenue, health system coverage, and associated child and maternal health outcomes in 89 low-income and middle-income countries from 1995–2011.
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This paper outlines the background to and design of the Health Financing Progress Matrix (HFPM), WHO’s standardized qualitative approach to assessing country health financing systems. Primarily qualitative in nature, the HFPM assesses a country’s health financing institutions, processes, policie...s and their implementation, benchmarked against good practice in the context of universal health coverage (UHC). The paper also details processes which ensure that country assessments are credible. While health financing is only one of the core functions of a health system, it significantly influences both the extent to which the population accesses health services, and the extent to which they face financial hardship in the process. Through a forward-looking assessment process the HFPM contributes to building resilience within health systems, which also contributes directly to improved emergency preparedness and response.
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The majority of developing countries will fail to achieve their targets for Universal Health Coverage (UHC)1 and the health- and poverty-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) unless they take urgent steps to strengthen their health financing. Just over a decade out from the SDG deadline of 20...30, 3.6 billion people do not receive the most essential health services they need, and 100 million are pushed into poverty from paying out-of-pocket for health services. The evidence is strong that progress towards UHC, core to SDG 3, will spur inclusive and sustainable economic growth, yet this will not happen unless countries achieve high-performance health financing, defined here as funding levels that are adequate and sustainable; pooling that is sufficient to spread the financial risks of ill-health; and spending that is efficient and equitable to assure desired levels of health service coverage, quality, and financial protection for all people— with resilience and sustainability.
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The world has been turned on its head by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This has provided a stark wakeup call on the severe under-financing of health systems around the world. It has laid bare the inequalities and limitations in the capacities of countries at all levels of develop...ment to prevent major health crises or respond to them. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
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Comprehensive and comparable estimates of health spending in each country are a key input for health
policy and planning, and are necessary to support the achievement of national and international health goals. Previous
studies have tracked past and projected future health spending until 2040 and ...shown that, with economic development,
countries tend to spend more on health per capita, with a decreasing share of spending from development assistance
and out-of-pocket sources. We aimed to characterise the past, p
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Development assistance for health (DAH), the value of which peaked in 2013 and fell in 2015, is unlikely to rise substantially in the near future, increasing reliance on domestic and innovative financing sources to sustain health programmes in low-income and middle-income countries. We examined inno...vative financing instruments (IFIs)—financing schemes that generate and mobilise funds—to estimate the quantum of financing mobilised from 2002 to 2015. We identified ten IFIs, which mobilised US$8·9 billion (2·3% of overall DAH) in 2002–15. The funds generated by IFIs were channelled mostly through GAVI and the Global Fund, and used for programmes for new and underused vaccines, HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and maternal and child health. Vaccination programmes received the largest amount of funding ($2·6 billion), followed by HIV/AIDS ($1080·7 million) and malaria ($1028·9 million), with no discernible funding targeted to non-communicable diseases.
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An adequate amount of prepaid resources for health is important to ensure access to health services and for the pursuit of universal health coverage. Previous studies on global health financing have described the relationship between economic development and health financing. In this study, we furth...er explore global health financing trends and examine how the sources of funds used, types of services purchased, and development assistance for health disbursed change with economic development. We also identify countries that deviate from the trends.
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Financing Global Health 2013: Transition in an Age of Austerity, IHME’s fifth annual report on global health expenditure, depicts financing trends that underline the resilience of development assistance for health. This year’s updated estimates show that despite lackluster economic growth and fi...scal cutbacks in many developed countries, total assistance remained steady, reaching an all-time high of $31.3 billion in 2013. While annual increases have leveled off since 2010, continued international funding is a sign of the international development community’s enduring support for global health.
The report also shows shifts in sources of financing. As funding from many bilateral donors and development banks has declined, growth in funding from the GAVI Alliance, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, non-governmental organizations, and the UK government is counteracting these cuts. Development assistance for different health issues is tracked up to 2011, revealing that the greatest increase in funding was for maternal, newborn, and child health.
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Over the last few years, there has been growing attention to health systems research in fragile and conflict-affected setting (FCAS) from both researchers and donors. In 2012, an exploratory literature review was conducted to analyse the main themes and findings of recent literature focusing on heal...th financing in FCAS.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has had unprecedented public health, economic, and social impacts on the international community, and prompted an unprecedented range and size of policy actions globally. Collective efforts, at national, regional, and global levels, were called for to contain and mitigate such ...impacts. The public health response measures alone proved to be insufficient, calling for additional socio-economic policy interventions such as ring-fencing economic activities to contain the spread of the virus. Faced with devastating socio-economic costs, all possible sources of financing, both public and private, have been explored.
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Explore domestic and ODA health financing data for all developing countries and relevant country groups. Navigate directly to information by clicking on a nation’s name in the country list. Methodology and data sources explained on the two final pages
This report summarizes the findings of the Health Financing Progress Matrix assessment for Zambia. Recognizing the remarkable progress towards UHC made by the country over the past twenty years, the report also highlights weaknesses in the current health financing system and, extending from this, th...ose priority issues to be addressed in order to further accelerate Zambia’s progress towards universal health coverage (UHC).
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This report summarizes the findings of the Health Financing Progress Matrix assessment for Zambia. Recognizing the remarkable progress towards UHC made by the country over the past twenty years, the report also highlights weaknesses in the current health financing system and, extending from this, th...ose priority issues to be addressed in order to further accelerate Zambia’s progress towards universal health coverage (UHC).
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