What is it about?
This paper proposes norms for secondary and tertiary care components of public hospital system in terms of bed capacity and financial allocations. Actual composition of public hospital system in Andhra Pradesh (AP) is compared with the proposed norms. Consistency of financial allocations with proposed norms is examined using data for a period of 10 years.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
The composition of the hospital sector has important implications for cost effectiveness accessibility and coverage.
Perspectives
The shift in allocative emphasis away from hospitals and in favour of primary health care during the 1980s was found to have been equally shared by secondary and tertiary hospitals. The shares of recurrent (non-plan) expenditure to secondary and tertiary hospitals were 51% and 49% respectively. This can be compared to a derived norm of 66% and 33%. The opportunity that new investment funds (plan schemes) could have provided to rectify the expenditure bias against secondary level hospitals was missed as two-thirds of plan expenditure were also spent on tertiary level hospitals. The share of secondary hospital bed capacity was 45.5% against India's Planning Commission norm of 70%. Public spending strategies should explicitly consider what mix of hospital services is being financed as well as the balance between hospital and primary health care expenditures.
Prasanta Mahapatra
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Resource allocation for public hospitals in Andhra Pradesh, India, Health Policy and Planning, January 1995, Oxford University Press (OUP),
DOI: 10.1093/heapol/10.1.29.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
