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discussion on trends in access to health in the OIC member countries as a group vis-à-vis the rest of
the world around the four dimensions of access to health discussed in : (1) physical
accessibility (good services are within reasonable reach of everybody), (2) financial affordability
(people’s ability to pay without financial hardship), (3) acceptability (people’s willingness to seek
services and or utilization of condolences) and (4) people’s right to seek, receive and contribute health
related information.
3.2. Trends of access to health in OIC vs. non-OIC countries
In this section we look into historical trends of access to health in OIC countries and compare those
against trends of non-OIC countries. We will use selected indicators for each of the four dimensions to
keep the document manageable.
Physical accessibility:
We look at availability of nurses and midwifes and immunisation (DTP) coverage as indicators of
physical accessibility to health services graphs group wise weighted averages of these two
indicators.
We can see that for some income-OIC groups these accessibility indicators have not consistently
increased throughout the 20-year period. This is especially worrisome as we have seen that outcome
indicators of demand for health increased over the same period. If the physical accessibility to health
services does not keep up with the pattern of demand for health, that is cause for concern. In fact, some
indicators of physical accessibility even deteriorated over the period. There are five instances where
the indicators i an receded between two consecutive periods for the OIC group.
For example, the number of nurses and midwives in low-income OIC countries went from 0.78 per
1,000 people in 1996-2000 period to 0.73 per 1,000 people in 2001-2005. In lower-middle income OIC
countries, this number went from 1.49 per 1,000 people in 2006-2010 period to 1.37 per 1,000 people
in 2011-2015. In contrast, only a single such case of period-to-period reduction is seen i
for the non-OIC group. This is in relation to DPT coverage between 2006-2010 to 2011-2015.
These deteriorations experienced in OIC countries may be explained by substantial and catastrophic
decline in specific OIC countries, which drag the group average down. For example, DPT coverage in
low-income OIC group can be linked to dramatic decrease observed in conflict affected OIC countries
such as Syria (80% in 2010 to 41% in 2015), Guinea (64% in 2010 to 45% in 2015) and Yemen (76%
in 2010 to 69% in 2015). Regarding the indicator of coverage of nurses and midwives for lower-
middle-income OIC countries, the deterioration is driven by the decline in Egypt (3.5 per 1,000 people
in 2010 to 1.4 per 1,000 people in 2014).
also shows a noticeable increase (from a base figure of 0.1 in 1996-2000 to 1.38 in 2011-
2015) in the availability of nurses and midwifes in low income non-OIC countries. It is indeed a
phenomenal achievement because the value of 1.38 means that these low income non-OIC countries
have in fact done better than the lower middle-income OIC group (1.37 in 2011-2015). In contrast the
low-income OIC group had only marginally improved the availability of nurses and midwives over the
same period.