What does making progress in health financing, in support of UHC mean? How do countries know whether they are heading in the right direction? To answer these questions WHO’s Department of Health Systems Governance and Financing is holding an Organised Session at AfHEA 2019, on Tuesday, 12 March 2019 between 15:00-16:30 in Palm Jumeriah.
Over the past year, WHO together with its partners has developed a set of questions, organized around a number of matrices, which in turn are based on the health financing functions of revenue raising, pooling, purchasing and benefit design. The session will present examples of questions in each of the matrices, and the logic on which they are based. Essentially, the foundations of the matrices are global evidence on which health financing policies work in order to facilitate progress towards UHC, and normative thinking.
The primary objective of the matrices is to facilitate monitoring and importantly, in the process, to provide recommendations, direction, and priorities for action. In addition, there are many spin-off applications of the matrices, in particular to feed into strategic planning processes. An excel-based application has been developed to facilitate use of the matrices at the country level, and provide rapid feedback in terms, for example, of heatmaps.
Leading academics, policy makers, and practitioners will come together to discuss the application of the matrices in two countries, Tanzania, Uganda. An increasing number of countries will begin to apply the matrices in the coming months, and it is envisaged that they will become the standard reference for monitoring the key aspects of health financing policy in countries, and the extent to which it is consistent with the objectives and goals of UHC.