18 December 2014,
Green Templeton College, Oxford

16-18 December 2014

Addressing health system inefficiencies to sustain PHC-led approaches towards Universal Health Coverage

Universal Health Coverage (UHC) means that everyone is able to use needed, good quality health services without fear of financial ruin as a consequence. The World Health Report 2010 noted that getting “more health for the money”, i.e. improving efficiency, is of vital importance on the path to UHC, as this allows for greater progress on one or a combination of these UHC goals from a given level of health spending. Equally important is a functioning primary care based delivery system for providing affordable and high quality services. Health systems exhibit inefficiencies to varying degrees.

However, countries can and do undertake reforms aimed at addressing these inefficiencies, but their experiences have not been well documented. As one of the cross-cutting initiatives identified in the WHO Plan of Action on Health System Financing for Universal Coverage, WHO seeks to produce and disseminate country case examples of such reforms and synthesize lessons learned.

At the workshop, a collection of country cases spanning the Asian (China, South Korea), African (Ethiopia, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Ghana) and Latin American (Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, El Salvador) will be presented followed by synthesis of lessons.

This workshop is a collaboration between the WHO, Blavatnik School of Government and Green Templeton College’s Global Health Policy Program, and sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The workshop will be attended by - amongst others - Joe Kutzin, coordinator of health care financing and systems at WHO, Dan Kress, director of integrated delivery division at the Gates foundation and Hong Wang, program officer also at the Gates Foundation. 

Please note this is a private event. 

 

WEBINAR: Lessons learned from reforms aimed at improving efficiency in health systems 

Thursday 18 December 2014, 13:30-15:30 (GMT, UK time zone); 14:30–16:30 CET 

The webinar will provide an opportunity to present the specific nature of the efficiency problem in medicine use, high cost health care, health workforce and health insurance market and the effectiveness of reforms undertaken to address it in selected African, Asian and Latin American countries. More information on the webinar and how to register can be found on WHO website.