Understanding the details of health spending is crucial. Health accounts are a critical area of health systems strengthening and an essential step towards achieving universal health coverage.
Health accounts help monitor spending and provide insights from past expenditure to enable administrators to improve planning and allocation of resources within the health system, thus increasing efficiency and accountability.
“The insight from health accounts help assess impact of current policies and inform future resource allocation and expenditure decisions. They also help reduce inequalities and protect people from catastrophic health expenditures, ” says Dr Roderico H. Ofrin, WHO Representative to India.
The WHO Country office for India is working with the Government of Rajasthan in implementing the first round of health accounts as a step towards institutionalizing processes and budgetary allocations.
An orientation session for state officials was organised in Jaipur on Wednesday, 26 May 2022 to help understand various facets of health accounts.
An orientation session for Rajasthan state government officials was organised in Jaipur on 26 May 2022. © WHO India
During the meeting, Mr Akhil Arora, Principal Secretary (Finance) noted that there is a need to use the health accounts exercise to determine how well the state is doing and what needs to be done differently going forward.
Dr Prithvi Raj, Secretary, Medical Health & Family Welfare said that state spending this year on health is more than USD 2.2 billion and therefore, while it will be challenging, all personnel are keen to take this exercise forward.
Health accounts serve as an important tool to generate evidence-based policymaking and WHO plans to undertake this exercise with other states in India as well.