Delivering Effective Health Care for All

Joint RPC Conference 2010

The Delivering Effective Health Care for All conference was held at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on 29th March 2010. The joint RPC event was supported by DFID to bring together new evidence from TARGETS, the Communicable Diseases: Vulnerability, Risk and Poverty RPC (COMDIS) and the Consortium for Research on Equitable Health Systems (CREHS).

For the past 5-6 years, these Consortia have been operating to conduct multidisciplinary research on health services and health systems issues in a variety of country contexts. The resulting conference presented a range of findings and experiences from multidisciplinary teams working in over 16 countries. The conference programme was built around four common themes:

Making health systems work for the poor Functioning health systems, which respond to the needs of all citizens, are essential for expanding and sustaining coverage of services and improving health outcomes. Health systems are also social institutions with potential to contribute to poverty reduction directly through protecting households against financial risk of illness, and indirectly as part of the broader set of institutions that generate social protection, social cohesion and resulting equity enhancement.

Reducing barriers to access: addressing the social, financial and supply-side barriers to care E.g. Social messaging to improve health seeking behaviour; Retaining health workers in rural areas; Protecting the poor against the catastrophic costs of care.

Engaging service providers: public, private and community-based health provision E.g. Monitoring health provider performance; Cost effectiveness and sustainability of delivery mechanisms; Integrated programmes for the control of communicable diseases.

Scaling up health services and policies: working with policymakers and programmes to implement change E.g. Promoting evidence-based health policies and programmes; Overcoming the challenges of health policy implementation; The role of public-private partnerships in delivering services

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