An Idiot's Guide to Prioritization in the Health Sector
Every year, Ministries of Health the world over develop annual budgets for the health sector. Every year, donors, academicians, advocacy groups, medical trade unions and professional organizations, and health service managers and providers complain...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2013
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2002/03/6630353/idiots-guide-prioritization-health-sector http://hdl.handle.net/10986/13747 |
| Summary: | Every year, Ministries of Health the
world over develop annual budgets for the health sector.
Every year, donors, academicians, advocacy groups, medical
trade unions and professional organizations, and health
service managers and providers complain that the budgets
have the wrong priorities. While all these groups are united
in their unhappiness with the priorities reflected in these
budgets, they disagree on what the priorities should be and
on how the prioritization process should be conducted. A
review of the published literature reveals a lack of
consensus in the policy and academic communities on how best
to prioritize health sector budgets. What is more surprising
is that the literature review reveals little documentation
on how countries actually do prioritize health expenditures.
This paper attempts to address both gaps in information
about prioritization. The first part of the paper describes
hat goes into a prioritization exercise. This typically
includes advocates, prioritization criteria, and
methodologies for making choices. The first part also
describes the analytical tools available to understand who
gains and who loses from decisions taken in developing a
budget for the health sector. The second part of the paper
documents and actual prioritization exercise undertaken in
Bangladesh between the years 1996 and 1999. As the title of
this paper indicates, this is not a theoretical or academic
paper. It is simply meant to empower potential practitioners
by introducing them to the players involved in the process,
the techniques utilized by these players, the political
realities that drive the process, and some evaluation techniques. |
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