What is health care financing?
Sustainable health care systems are built on reliable and affordable access to care for its population. Financial resources are required to pay for investment into health facilities and equipment, to compensate health service staff for their time and to pay for drugs and other consumerables.
How these financial resources are generated and managed – the process of resource mobilization or collection of funds, pooling of funds and purchasing for health services – raises important issues for policy makers faced with the challenge of designing systems of funding that meet the specific cultural and political goals of their countries.
Broad health financing goals are for example:
- Promoting universal protection of its population against financial risk
- Promoting a more equitable distribution of the burden of funding the health system
Intermediate objectives that are instrumental to reach the broad health financing goals are for example:
- Promoting equitable use and provision of services relative to the need for such services
- Improving transparency and accountability of the health sector to the population
- Promoting quality and efficiency in service delivery
- Improving efficiency in the administration of the health financing system.
The focus of WHO's work in the Pacific is to support countries in attaining these goals by gathering evidence for policy making. The tracking of health expenditures is the basis to do so – this is why we promote and support the introduction and sustaining of National Health Accounts (NHA) in the Pacific. See more about this from the links on the right side.