FRAMEWORKS AND MEASURES FOR HEALTH SYSTEMS PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

Abstract

Population health is a duty for all the governments. In order to improve the quality of health services and to ensure sustainability of the health systems, the assessment of systems performance became mandatory. World Health Organization undertook in 2000 a comparative assessment of the performance of health systems for 191 member states, based on a generic framework. The results highlighted the strenghts and the weaknesses of the systems, stimulating the political interest for monitoring health systems performance. The purpose of this paper is a critical review of the frameworks applied for performance assessment of the health systems. The article summarizes the steps taken in frameworks design and the sets of indicators derived from them. These evaluations provide effective models for health systems stewardship, guiding policy-makers. The emphasis is put on unifying reporting standards of data and indicators and on coordination of methodologies, to ensure reliable cross-country comparisons for mutual learning.

Keywords

• health system
• health system performance framework
• health system assessment
• health system indicators