National health accounts

NHA for specific diseases, programs, population groups, and regions

Subaccounts

Subaccounts are used to collect and report information on resources used in specific health programmes and target groups, considered to be priorities, for example, expenditures on the health-related MDGs. Subaccounts are generated following the general health accounts methodology but instead of covering the consumption by the whole health system, they measure a selected part of it. They may refer to specific accounts for a health programme, a factor of production, a disease management or a population group.

Health accounts for Malaria

How much is spent on malaria?
How is malaria spending distributed?
The guide to producing malaria subaccounts focuses on the measurement of all the resources used in the prevention, treatment and control of malaria in a country. The document has an operational approach on how to develop the accounts. It also provides examples on how to solve common challenges for health expenditure accounting, such as missing data or apportioning of shared expenditures.

Health accounts for specific diseases/programs

Disease-specific accounts is an exhaustive and exclusive allocation of total expenditure on health (THE) by diseases.. These health accounts are more comprehensive since they reproduce a full NHA methodology in terms of all matrices (financing sources, financing agents, functions and providers), to a sub-section of THE (disease-specific related expenditure only). Two disease-specific health accounts can lead to double counting (eg overlap between HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis), therefore cannot be added up or compared. Recent work have been done on Malaria, HIV and TB.

Health accounts for child health

Child health subaccounts can be used in various ways to assist child health policy and programming. They provide answers to specific questions regarding child health financing in the same way that general NHA answers questions on overall health care financing.

Health accounts for specific regions

Regional health accounts (RH) is an exhaustive and exclusive allocation of total expenditures on health to all regions of a country, using NHA methodology Particularly relevant for decentralized economies.
The key methodological difficulty is to appropriately account for expenditures in the region of residence of the patient.

Health accounts for reproductive health

This document offers detailed guidelines on the construction of health accounts on reproductive health care (RH) and shows how various techniques and approaches can be used to focus on specific categories of spending that contribute to RH, including other antenatal care, child birth and family planning.

Health accounts for specific population groups

Distributional table for population groups analyses total expenditure on health by age, sex, or socio economic characteristics.
Age or gender specific sub accounts can use full NHA methodology (boundaries, classification and all matrices) for a specific break up of the population group.

To obtain prepublication versions of the guides to producing subaccounts, please write to nhaweb@who.int

New

News

System of Health Accounts 2011 (SHA 2011)

Key documents

This Guide is now available in Arabic, French and Spanish also and in draft form in Chinese and Russian .

Guide to producing Reproductive health subaccounts