Journalists
from print and electronic media houses were yesterday briefed on the 2015
National Health Accounts (NHA).
NHA
is a survey that the Ministry of Health intends to embark on in collaboration
with its development partners starting this month, August, and will last for
three months.
Speaking
at the press briefing held at NaNA conference hall, Gibril Jarju, deputy
director of Planning and Information, said healthcare systems in all countries
including The Gambia continue to evolve in response to changing demographics
and disease patterns, rapid technological advances, and more and more complex
financing and delivery mechanisms.
“In
striving towards some of the common health care system goals of equity,
efficiency and effectiveness of care, one of the key questions for policymakers
is ‘How much do we spend on health and is it measured in a comparable way?” he
said.
Mr
Jarju said to meet the increasing demands of analysts and policymakers for such
health expenditure information, System of Health Accounts (SHA) proposed a
framework for the systematic description of the financial flows related to
healthcare.
He
explained that the aim of SHA is to describe the healthcare system from an
expenditure perspective both for international and national purposes.
Similarly,
National Health Accounts is a framework for tracking the flow of all health
funds (public, private, households, and donor) in a country. It is intended to
inform policy process.
Research
has shown that over the past two decades, more than 100 low and middle-income
countries (27 of them in Africa) have conducted NHA estimations that generated
evidence for country-level policy decision-making as well as for cross country
comparisons.
“Now,
many countries including The Gambia are trying to institutionalise the NHA
methodology so that they can carry out the exercise on a regular basis and
report on health financing trends,” the deputy director of Planning and
Information said.
Modou
Njai, director of Health Promotion and Education Directorate, called on the
media to share the findings of the 2015 NHA survey result.
Vincent
Mendy, project coordinating unit, said the NHA provide a systematic description
of the financial flows related to the consumption of healthcare products and to
develop reliable and timely data that is comparable both across countries and
over time.
It
also offers comprehensive reviews of health expenditures from their financing
sources to their end users.
NHA,
according to Mendy, also helps in tracking public, private and donor
expenditure on health by addressing several sets of questions.
