Proceedings of the 13th Meeting of the
COMCEC Poverty Alleviation Working Group
25
Policy Advice 2: Strengthening primary healthcare particularly in poorer areas through
encouraging skilled health staff to work in rural and remote areas and enhancing
integrated health promotion and prevention interventions.
Rationale:
As the cornerstone of health systems worldwide, primary healthcare is fundamental for the
physical, psychological and social well-being of the people. Strengthening primary healthcare
mechanisms increasingly comes to governments’ agenda as global experience proves them
successful. However, there are ongoing challenges that affect negatively the health status of
communities. Non-communicable diseases are on the rise globally. Ensuring sustainable
mechanisms for maternal and child health are still challenging for many countries.
Access to primary health care services is a serious challenge in many OIC countries due to
inadequate health infrastructure, physical inaccessibility accompanied by the high out-of-
pocket spending and/or inadequate health workforce. In this context, interventions that will
ensure cost-effective healthcare service are needed to be considered including encouraging
skilled health personnel to provide services in rural and remote areas and enhancing
community awareness and integrated primary healthcare (promotive and preventive)
mechanisms. Moreover, as the key component of primary healthcare, regular screenings need
to be performed.
Policy Advice 3: Promoting the engagement of private sector in the provision of safe and
quality healthcare in close partnership with public authorities and with well-designed
monitoring mechanisms.
Rationale:
Public financing is crucial to achieve universal health coverage sustainably. In order to ensure
financial protection for all people and equitable access to quality health services, the allocation
of considerable share in government budget is essential without prejudice to other national
plans or priorities. However, considering the budget constraints in many countries, additional
domestic resources are needed to be mobilized to achieve universal health coverage. In this
manner, private initiatives can play a significant role to complement the public efforts. For
example, in order to fill the gaps and shortcomings in public health service delivery (e.g.
inadequate human resources and physical infrastructure), the government of Indonesia has
started to actively encourage the private sector to contribute to health service delivery. In his
framework, the private healthcare providers currently cover up to 60 per cent of health care
in Indonesia (in particular hospital care).
On the other hand, there is a need for a well-designed monitoring mechanism. Outdated
legislation, lack of enforcement of public health regulations and a widely unregulated private
sector may leave consumers unprotected. Therefore, governments would need to put forward
effective regulatory schemes to guide private sector and avoid the market failure in order to
(i) assess whether private health care services are safe, effective and of good quality, (ii)
examine to what extent patients fromdifferent socio-economic and socio-cultural backgrounds