Target 3.8 is defined as “Achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all”. The concern is with all people and communities receiving the quality health services they need (including medicines and other health products), without financial hardship. Two indicators have been chosen to monitor target 3.8 within the SDG framework. Indicator 3.8.1 is for health service coverage and indicator 3.8.2 focuses on health expenditures in relation to a household’s budget to identify financial hardship caused by direct health care payments. Taken together, indicators 3.8.1 and 3.8.2 are meant to capture the service coverage and financial protection dimensions, respectively, of target 3.8. These two indicators should be always monitored jointly.

Coverage of essential health services (defined as the average coverage of essential services based on tracer interventions that include reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health, infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases and service capacity and access, among the general and the most disadvantaged population).

The indicator is an index reported on a unitless scale of 0 to 100, which is computed as the geometric mean of 14 tracer indicators of health service coverage.

The tracer indicators are as follows, organized by four subindices of service coverage:

1. Reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health

2. Infectious diseases

3. Noncommunicable diseases

4. Service capacity and access

As a measure of SDG indicator 3.8.1, the UHC service coverage index combines 14 tracer indicators of service coverage into a single summary measure.

Full disaggregation of the index is not currently possible as not all tracer indicators have data that allow for disaggregation.

For each country, the most recent value for each tracer indicators is taken from WHO or other international agencies

The index uses a weighted geometric mean (where the weight is the denominator population of the indicator) within each of the four health subindices, and then a geometric mean is calculated from those four values.

Using the country level tracer indicators and corresponding denominators, an aggregate at the tracer level and aggregate denominator population is computed and used to calculate regional and global aggregates as described in method of estimation

2-3 years

1-5 years

hoj@who.int

Jessica Ho

4834

Due to data limitations, not all tracer indicators used to compute the index are direct measures of service coverage. These proxy indicators will be replaced in future years when more data become available. The selected tracer indicators are meant to represent the broad range of essential health services necessary for progress towards UHC; they should not be interpreted as a recommended basket of services.

not be interpreted as a recommended basket of services. Country index values of 80 and over are reported as ≥80 for presentation purposes to avoid comparisons that are not meaningful given the inability of the index to adequately distinguish between countries with high level of service coverage provision