Health Sector Efficiency in Kenya : Implications for Fiscal Space
The health system in Kenya is currently going through a major transition with the implementation of the new constitution. The responsibility to deliver essential health services has been devolved to the 47 counties while the national government is...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2014
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2013/10/20330673/health-sector-efficiency-kenya-implications-fiscal-space http://hdl.handle.net/10986/20806 |
| Summary: | The health system in Kenya is currently
going through a major transition with the implementation of
the new constitution. The responsibility to deliver
essential health services has been devolved to the 47
counties while the national government is responsible for
policy making and operating the national referral hospitals.
The government is giving a high priority to the health
sector and has waived user fees at primary health facilities
and introduced free maternity care at all public health
facilities to increase access to essential health services.
The government is also committed to achieving universal
health coverage. While these are notable measures, the
challenge is to ensure that there are adequate resources
available to meet these commitments. More importantly,
given that the available public health sector resources are
limited, it is necessary to ensure that they are optimally
used for providing health services to the greatest number of
people possible ensuring better value for money.
Unfortunately, the Ministry of Health has limited
information on the operational efficiency of the health
system at different levels of care. The overarching
objective of this study is to assess the efficiency in the
public health sector. Specifically the study: i) estimated
the technical efficiency of samples of dispensaries, health
centres and hospitals in urban and rural counties; ii)
reviewed critically the ongoing pilots on performance based
financing and output based aid to highlight potential
efficiency gains and policy options for national scale-up.
The study applied the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)
approach to analyse technical efficiency of randomly
selected sample of twenty four district hospitals, two
hundred and ninety five health centres and thirty-eight
dispensaries using output and input data for FY 2012. |
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