Uganda : Does Information Matter?
Uganda has made important progress toward meeting the Millennium Development Goals, including halving its poverty rate to around 20 percent from more than 50 percent in the early 1990s. But healthcare, especially in the rural areas, is generally of...
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| Format: | Brief |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
Washington, DC
2015
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2015/11/25485734/uganda-information-matter http://hdl.handle.net/10986/23342 |
| Summary: | Uganda has made important progress
toward meeting the Millennium Development Goals, including
halving its poverty rate to around 20 percent from more than
50 percent in the early 1990s. But healthcare, especially in
the rural areas, is generally of poor quality. Small
clinics, known as dispensaries, provide care to Uganda’s
rural residents. The clinics offer preventive, maternity,
and outpatient care, as well as lab services. All services
are supposed to be free. Six to 10 people staff most
clinics, including a trained medical worker, nurses, nursing
aides, and others. But roughly 50 percent of the staff are
absent on a typical day and patients’ average wait time
exceeds two hours. Uganda’s health sector is decentralized
and Health Unit Management Committees are supposed to be the
link between the community and the facility. In practice,
there’s little action on the part of the committees in terms
of supervision or support. In 2005, a World Bank supported
team decided to test the impact of a program to encourage
rural residents to get involved in local health care
delivery. Community members and health staff were given
report cards grading the quality of local clinics, including
information about specific clinic operations, absences and
the quality of care. Meetings were facilitated between
community members and health facilities to allow them to
draw up a shared vision of what was needed and make a plan
to achieve this. A year later, the evaluation found that the
quality of healthcare improved, as reflected in lower child
mortality and improved child weight. In 2007, the team
expanded the project in order to test whether just bringing
people together with health providers for meetings and
encouraging community monitoring processes, without
providing report cards, could be as effective. |
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