Health Equity: 08/13/09

Thursday, August 13, 2009

[EQ] Three methods to monitor utilization of healthcare services by the poor

Three methods to monitor utilization of healthcare services by the poor

Abbas Bhuiya, SMA Hanifi, Farhana Urni, Shehrin Shaila Mahmood

Social and Behavioural Sciences Unit, Public Health Sciences Division, ICDDR, Dhaka , Bangladesh

International Journal for Equity in Health 2009, 8:29 doi:10.1186/1475-9276-8-29

Available online as PDF file at: http://www.equityhealthj.com/content/pdf/1475-9276-8-29.pdf

“……Achieving equity by way of improving the condition of the economically poor or otherwise disadvantaged is among the core goals of contemporary development paradigm. This places importance on monitoring outcome indicators among the poor.

National surveys allow disaggregation of outcomes by socioeconomic status at national level and do not have statistical adequacy to provide estimates for lower level administrative units. This limits the utility of these data for programme managers to know how well particular services are reaching the poor at the lowest level. Managers are thus left without a tool for monitoring results for the poor at lower levels.

This paper demonstrates that with some extra efforts community and facility based data at the lower level can be used to monitor utilization of healthcare services by the poor…..”

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[EQ] Ensuring the Poor Share Fully in the Benefits

Ensuring that the Poor Share Fully in the Benefits Publication Information

Technical Working Papers

Davidson R. Gwatkin, Date of Publication July 2009
Results-Based Financing (RBF)

Available at: http://www.rbfhealth.org/rbfhealth/system/files/RBF_Tech_Equity_03.pdf

“……If programs are undertaken without conscious attention to including disadvantaged groups, there are a priori reasons for suspecting that they will favor the better-off, thereby exacerbating inequalities. But such an outcome is far from inevitable. Many plausible approaches are available for directing benefits toward the poor; and several of these have proven effective often enough to deserve serious consideration for application elsewhere.
Even when such approaches are applied, however, predicting the equity outcome of any given Results-Based Financing RBF strategy in any particular setting remains more of an art than a science; and only after the fact, through careful monitoring, is it possible to assess an RBF project’s equity consequences with reasonable certainty….

The equity impact of result-based financing (RBF) programs is not predetermined. Rather, it depends upon how the programs are designed and implemented.

….

Results-Based Financing (RBF) for Health is a national-level tool for increasing the quantity and quality of health services used or provided based on cash or in-kind payments to providers, payers, and consumers after predetermined health results (outputs or outcomes) have been achieved. It combines the use of incentives for health-related behaviors with a strong focus on results, and can support efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

http://www.rbfhealth.org/rbfhealth/about/partners

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