Building Capacity to Institutionalize National Health Accounts in Egypt
Jun 16 2009
Health Systems 20/20 is working with the Egyptian Ministry of Health (MOH) on Egypt's fourth round of National Health Accounts (NHA) estimates to capture public, private, and donor contributions, in addition to examining overall health care expenditures.
As the largest public provider of health services, especially for the poor, the Ministry of Health (MOH) has a particular opportunity and responsibility to manage its resources well. Savings generated by improved planning and resource management are essential to sustain and finance reforms being planned and implemented by the MOH.
Twenty participants representing the main health spending entities in Egypt including the Ministry of Finance, the Egyptian Medical Syndicate, the Health Insurance Organization, the MOH’s Departments of Planning, Finance, and Free Medication Department, were selected to form an NHA Egypt task force. This variety of backgrounds will provide access to different data sources perhaps unknown or unavailable to any one entity, and facilitates a critical appraisal of team results. The task force will be responsible for data collection and analysis.
Health Systems 20/20, in cooperation with the MOH’s Department of Planning and the World Health Organization, organized a Trainer of Trainees (ToT) for the task force May 10-13, 2009. The objective of the ToT was to build local capacity and train the Egyptian NHA team on data collection methods, data processing and analysis, construction of NHA tables, and interpretation of the findings in the context of Egyptian policy relevance. Health Systems 20/20 is providing the technical leadership for the data collection and analysis and is working with the task force to ensure that they use internationally established methods and boundaries for estimating health care expenditures.
