Course: Transforming Primary Health Care through Health Systems Strengthening

While it’s clear that much more evidence is needed to guide decision making in health systems, there is disagreement about the questions we should be asking and the types of …

What patterns can we observe in the complex dynamics of mixed health systems? In this week we have already looked at some findings within the Lancet series on the private …

How can we intervene in health markets to achieve health system goals, particularly equity? In the previous step you saw that there are a number of regulatory approaches that can …

Much of the debate about the private sector focuses on its own activities and their efficiency, effectiveness, quality, and distribution. But this debate misses the most important point. What are …

In your setting, are there any examples of ‘mixing’ of types of health financing and service provision (for example, publicly-funded privately-provided services, or privately-funded public services)? Please comment below.

There are several characteristics of mixed health systems in low and middle incomes countries that are driven in part by consumer preferences, their perceptions of the quality of services offered …

In week four we looked at private and public financing of health care, and recognised that both types of funding exist in almost all health systems. Of course, many health …

So, after looking at the frameworks, the tools available for measuring quality and the processes involved in improving quality, let’s see how this is translated into national policy. In this …

In 2018 an excellent review article was published, summarising all the strategies that have been used to improve the quality of care of newborns. As you would remember, newborn mortality …

Kris summarised the quality bottlenecks into two domains: provider competency and provider effort and attitudes. Yet sometimes, health workers might have little power to change how they are managed by …

2018 was the year of reports on quality of care with the publication of three very comprehensive documents: Delivering quality health services: a global imperative for universal health coverage The …

Health planners often encounter this dilemma: Do we try to achieve universal health coverage (UHC), or try to improve quality? Kris, in this discussion, has highlighted a contrasting risk: that …

One of the challenges of measuring quality care is data availability, as we mentioned earlier this week. Recently, the Health Data Collaborative at WHO reported that health workers spend 33% …

Not surprisingly, the approaches to measure quality vary in their complexity, depending on whether you are monitoring a quality assurance process within a health facility, implementing a quality improvement program …