The journey towards Universal Health Coverage requires inclusive social health protection based on health systems that are affordable and able to adapt to socio-demographic and technological changes responding to the evolving needs of the population. Understanding of the contextual factors along with a conducive health system governance and political commitment are deemed to be among the determinants of better health and key to improve social health protection performance. Good governance is explicitly mentioned in the SDG 16 that points to the need to “build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions. In broad terms, governance can be defined as how societies make and implement collective decisions. Yet, in relation to health systems, governance has been conceptualized in different ways, and there is no standard conceptualisation and methodology to assess its influence on social health protection.
The research program “Health systems governance for an inclusive and sustainable social health protection in Ghana and Tanzania” aims to investigate how to improve social health protection in these countries. To this end it focuses on understanding the main social health protection challenges and it investigates how social health protection can be strengthened. The program activities are framed taking into account the multi-level nature of governance and several governance domains.
On September 29th 2018 Simone Ghislandi presented at the Italian Health Economics Association 23rd Annual Conference, held at the University of Napoli Federico II, the paper:
“Impact of universal health coverage on medical care utilization: Evidence from Ghana”.
Authors: L. FiestasNavarrete, S. Ghislandi, F. Tediosi
Read more here: http://www.aiesweb.it/public/convegni/allegati/Programma_AIES_Finale_26_09.pdf
On September 14th Dr. Kenneth Harttgen presented at the first Conference of the Swiss Society of Health Economics the paper: “Machine learning to understand health insurance enrolment and take-up of health services”.
Read more here: https://www.sggoe.ch/conference-2018.html
Congratulations to our team members Paola Salari (Post-doc) and Igor Francetic (PhD student) for participating to the 2018 Global Symposium on Health Systems Research, taking place from October 8th in Liverpool, UK. Paola and Igor will have the opportunity to present results from our project’s research activities.
Read more here: http://healthsystemsresearch.org/hsr2018/
Between May and July 2018, researchers from our project conducted extensive data collection activities in different regions in Tanzania. The data collected in the 2018 round of data collection represents the core of the evidence supporting our research activities. Our two PhD students focusing on Tanzania - with the support of several local research assistants - carried out and supervised the data collection activities. The surveys mixed quantitative and qualitative techniques and touched 10 different districts across 3 regions in central Tanzania (Dodoma, Shinyanga and Iringa). The analysis is now on.