Improving health service delivery in developing countries
Author(s)/Editor(s): Peters D, El-Saharty S, Banafsheh Siadat et al.
Publisher/Organizer: The World Bank
Publication date: 2009
Number of pages: 366
Language: English
Overview
Improving health services is a crucial part of achieving the Millennium Development Goals in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Despite the abundance of evidence on the efficacy of interventions that can save lives at low cost, the pathways to delivering health services effectively in LMICs are not well known. Decision makers around the world need better information about which strategies to improve health services work best, or how to make current strategies more effective. [...]
This book helps us think beyond what can be learned from the simpler, reproducible, and controlled interventions that are commonly described in research but are less applicable in practice. It demonstrates how a better understanding of implementation processes—the “how to”—is a crucial complement to the evidence addressing which health intervention should be selected. By better recognizing how context matters—how enabling and inhibiting factors influence even the most standardized or well-intentioned health strategy—the book points a way for managers and decision makers to deal with the complexities they regularly face. Chapter 6 outlines a way of thinking of the institutional factors that influence the delivery of health services, which should be helpful for analysts, managers, and policy makers.