Corruption in the health sector

Literature review

This page presents a collection of recommended literature on various health sector issues. The titles are divided into nine categories:

CONTENT IN THIS SECTION:

•   General information
•   Corruption in the health sector
•   Documents from the International Anti-Corruption Conferences
•   Pay reform, salaries, and informal payments
•   Staff recruitment, posting, ethical training, ethical codes
•   Budgets and financing
•   Procurement

General information

World Development Report 2004

The 2004 edition of the World Bank's World Development Report focuses on basic services, particularly health, education, water and sanitation, and discusses ways to make them work for poor people. In light of widespread failure to make services accessible, affordable and of high quality, the report also points to success stories and concludes that services can be improved by putting poor people at the centre of service provision by enabling the poor to monitor and discipline service providers, by amplifying their voice in policymaking and by strengthening the incentives for providers to serve the poor.

This text provides a practical framework for making the services that contribute human development work for poor people. It is aimed at citizens, governments and donors who wish to take action and accelerate progress towards poverty reduction, as specified in the Millennium Development Goals. Of particular interest to development workers active in the health sector are chapters 8,10 and 11. Chapter 8 focuses health and nutrition services, in particular the health of poor people, market and government failures, strengthening client power and the voices of poor citizens, and provider incentives to serve the poor. Chapter 10 discusses public sector underpinnings of service reform, especially the importance of strengthening the foundations of government, wise spending, decentralisation, policy making, management and implementation, curbing corruption, and transition management. Chapter 11 concludes the report with a consideration of the role of donors in service reform, including aid and accountability, strengthening of the compact, management by provider organizations, increasing client power, promoting the voice of the poor, aligning aid delivery with service delivery, and the challenges of reforming aid.

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Human development Report 2003

The 2003 edition of the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report is devoted to the eight Millennium Development Goals that have transformed development and led to the reorientation of the work of governments, aid agencies and civil society organisations throughout the world. While welcoming commitments that have been made to reducing poverty and advancing development, the Report makes clear that the world is falling short of meeting these goals, in some areas much further than in others.

The central part of the report is devoted to assessing where the greatest problems are, analysing what needs to be done to reverse the setbacks, and offering concrete proposals on how to accelerate progress. The Report sets out a Millennium Development Compact which aims, not to propose another one-size-fits-all solution to the problems of the developing world, but to highlight the key areas of intervention that should guide national efforts and international support for the Goals.

Of particular interest to those working with development agencies in the health sectors of developing countries are chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4, entitled Public Policies to Improve People's Health and Education, focuses on setting the right policy priorities and includes an in-depth examination of the Goals related to hunger, education, health and water sanitation. This chapter also includes an action plan intended to boost the level, equity and efficiency of public spending - as well as the quantity and quality of official development assistance - for basic services. The following chapter considers the private financing and provision of health, education and water services, and considers issues of privatization of public services.

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The World Health Report 2000 - Health systems: Improving performance

The 2000 edition of the WHO's World Health Report is devoted entirely to health systems and represents an extension of the organisation's traditional concern for people's physical and mental well-being to emphasize the important elements of goodness and fairness within organizations, institutions and resources devoted to producing actions to improve people's health. It takes account of the roles people have as providers and consumers of health services, as financial contributors to health systems, as workers within them, and as citizens engaged in responsible management or stewardship, of them. It also considers successes and failures in addressing inequalities, how they respond to people's expectations, and how much or how little they respect people's dignity, rights and freedoms.

The report also provides an index of member states' national health systems' performance in trying to achieve three overall goals: good health, responsiveness to the expectations of the population, and fairness of financial contribution. As the WHO's members include developed countries, the focus is not exclusive to developing and transitional economies.

Good practice in the development of PRSP indicators and monitoring systems: Integrating PRSP indicators into policy formation processes
Booth, D., Lucas, H. , ODI Working Paper 172, 2002

This paper is based on a Desk Study of Good Practice in the Development of PRSP (Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper) Indicators and Monitoring Systems commissioned by DFID for the Strategic Partnership with Africa (SPA) in 2001. The report is divided into two sections reflecting the two phases of the study. Phase 1 was a critical review of PRSP documentation for sub-Saharan Africa, including four full PRSPs, 17 Interim PRSPs and 19 Joint Staff Assessments. Phase 2 involved a wide-ranging search for experiences and examples that might be drawn on in improving the way PRSPs handle monitoring and indicators. The key findings include the object, methodology and purpose of monitoring activities.

Country-specific information, as well as survey results and data used in the study are presented as annexes. In addition to more general information on poverty reduction and service delivery, the following health sector specific information is provided.

Annex 7 considers the cooperation between public health officials in a district in Siem Reap province of Cambodia and Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) in introducing a performance-based salary system, covering not only the hospital and health centres, but also the district administration and deliberately opting to 'purchase' the cooperation and good will of local staff.

Annex 8 describes an approach to the supply-side problem of administrative data within the health system of China, proven to be similar to the situation in sub-Saharan Africa despite the fact that their situations appear to be radically different. Annex 9 considers the attempt pioneered by Save the Children and Johns Hopkins University and funded by USAID to promote effective provider-community partnerships through the generation, analysis and use of information in Bolivia in developing a community health information system.

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USAID Anticorruption Strategy
United States Agency for International Development (USAID). January 2005. Washington, DC.

This document outlines the United States government's strategy for reducing opportunities and incentives for corruption as an important foreign policy objective. Corruption weakens the legitimacy and effectiveness of democracies, undermining social cohesion and broad participation in economic and political life. It also distorts allocation of resources in ways that harm the poor. It is a huge challenge for countries around the world.

Four core actions comprise USAID's new strategic direction for anticorruption. These are:

1. Confronting the dual challenges of grand and administrative corruption. In past years, USAID's anticorruption efforts have focused more on administrative (petty) corruption, rather than high-level, or grand corruption. While efforts to reduce administrative corruption alone can be effective, a more comprehensive and sustainable development solution must deal with the constraints of grand corruption. This includes developing tools to assess and measure grand corruption.
   
   
2. Deploy resources strategically to fight corruption. USAID plans to improve assessment frameworks and methodologies to determine priorities and better target programmatic responses considering the nature, location, and impact of corruption. USAID will also seek out partnerships to maximize the impact of anticorruption investments.
   
   
3. Incorporate anticorruption goals and activities across Agency work. Anticorruption goals will be integrated into missions and programs across multiple sectors, rather than concentrating them in the Democracy and Governance sector alone. Cross-team, interagency, and donor coordination mechanisms will be established to promote collaboration.
   
   
4. Build anticorruption knowledge. More resources will be dedicated to evaluating the impact of anticorruption programs, to document "best practice", and to promote synergies between anticorruption programs and programs to support gender equality.
   

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Poverty and Health
DAC Guidelines and Reference Series, OECD/WHO, 2003

This DAC Reference Document, jointly published by the OECD and WHO, presents a set of policy recommendations aimed at a broad range of development agency staff, policy makers and planners in partner countries. Its goal is to further increase the effectiveness of development cooperation in improving health for poor people as a means of reducing poverty and achieving the health-related Millennium Development Goals. The first chapter discusses the importance of investing in health to achieving poverty reduction. The second chapter focuses on supporting pro-poor health systems by strengthening the capacity of the public sector, developing effective and equitable public and private-sector services, strengthening public-private partnerships, and achieving equitable financing systems. The third chapter focuses on key policy areas involving actions outside of the health sector, such as education, food security, safe water, sanitation and energy. Country-led strategic frameworks are the topic of the fourth chapter, which emphasises the importance of long-term relationships between donors and partner countries to achieving sustainable health improvements that benefit the poor. In conclusion, this report discusses the health problems of the poor in the contexts of a globalised world and, in particular, the promotion of development of Global Public Goods for health, and the increasing influence that trade in goods and services and multilateral trade agreements have on the health of the poor.

Macroeconomics and health: investing in health for economic development
Sachs, J.D/Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, WHO, 2001

The key message of this WHO report is that the world community has the power to save the lives of millions of people a year and bolster development in the world's poorest countries and that this can be achieved by an increase in resources spent in the health sectors by developing countries and donors, and by investing these resources more wisely. The report outlines the current state of health sectors and health indicators for developing countries and the linkages between health and development. Current government and donor spending are detailed and a series of financial, structural and organisational recommendations are made that are aimed at improving the state of health care and services in low and middle income countries.

The key findings of this report include detailed data on the amount by which government and donor spending on health needs be increased and what impact this increase would have, which health conditions should be focussed on in order to prevent and treat conditions for which there are tried and tested interventions, that local service delivery should be prioritised and complemented by nationwide programmes for some major diseases, and that greater investment in research, development, surveillance and data collection is necessary for diseases that are concentrated in poor countries.

In addition to calling for an increase in spending, the report recommends that each low and middle income country establish a temporary National Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (NCMH) to formulate a long-term programme for scaling up essential health interventions, that the international community establish a Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria and a Global Health Research Fund, and that the international pharmaceutical industry ensure access of the low-income countries to essential medicines through commitments to provide such drugs at the lowest possible price in developing countries. Appendix 1 includes material on the 6 different working groups, whose group reports are available as separate documents.

The report of Working Group 3, "Mobilization of Domestic Resources for Health", is particularly relevant as it assesses the economic consequences of alternative approaches to resources mobilization for health systems and interventions from domestic resources. It focuses on how health systems can best be financed at country level, including by reallocation of public sector budgets and by expanding the role of the non-governmental sector.

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Sector-wide approaches for health development: a review of experience
Foster, Mick, Adrienne Brown and Tim Conway WHO, Geneva, June 2000

In 1999, the health-oriented Inter-Agency Group on Sector-wide Approaches and Development Cooperation commissioned five country case studies to review the experience with sector-wide approaches to date. This report provides the synthesis of the case study findings from Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania, Cambodia, and Vietnam, as well as an exploratory visit to Ethiopia, all of which are involved to some degree with a sector-wide approach to health development. Although there were marked variations between the countries in their commitment to a SWAp and in progress in implementation, it was possible to draw some conclusions about the value of the approach as an aid co-ordination mechanism. Before presenting these conclusions, this report provides detailed information on the development, content, financing and implementation of health sector programmes.

Current issues in sector-wide approaches for health development. Individual case studies. Papers in pdf-format, WHO, Geneva, June 2000:

• Uganda case study   (A. Brown)
  
• Mozambique case study   (A. Brown)
  
• Tanzania case study   (A. Brown)
  
• Viet Nam case study   (T. Conway)
  
• Cambodia case study   (T. Conway)

Health Financing Revisited: A Practitioner’s Guide
Gottret, P., and Schieber, G. The World Bank, 2006

This guide addresses the major changes in global health and financing policy that have occurred over the past 10 years. As a result of the global focus on poverty reduction, new global health threats from HIV/AIDS, SARS, and avian influenza, and the international community’s adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), global health policy has now become a development, national security, and humanitarian issue for all countries. Significant amounts of increased resources for development assistance, much of it targeted to health, have subsequently been forthcoming.

This report assesses health financing policies for their ability to improve health outcomes, provide financial protection, and ensure consumer satisfaction – in a equitable, efficient, and financially sustainable manner. It is intended to equip policy-makers at global and country levels with the tools for navigating this extremely complex domain by providing an overview of health financing policy in developing countries and is a primer on major health financing and fiscal issues

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