The Evaluation of National Health Systems

As the demand for health care grows faster than the finance available, many developing countries (and some developed ones) are forced to evaluate their health systems, and even reorganize them. This needs more than an endorsement of international health policies and the accumulation of evaluations of individual projects. It needs the use of all available data on health system performance and a comparison with the standards the system is meant to meet: these standards relate not only to biomedical matters, but to administration, resource use and public demand. This requires a good understanding of the structure and working of the system, and of how the evaluator's results may be applied. This book is based particularly on experience in the Caribbean and the countries of south east Asia.