One sunny day, your stomach's growling.
You bought a scrumptious great chicken burger..
from the great chicken burger restaurant, to satisfy your hunger...
Teeeetttt... Er, why are you telling me this story? What's the point??
Alright, now let's change the topic a bit. Let's talk about health system, er, briefly...
WHAT IS IT ?
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines a health system as "all the activities whose primary purpose is to promote, restore or maintain health".
THE 6 BUILDING BLOCKS...
WHO drafted a framework in 2007, to guide efforts to strengthen health systems. This framework identifies 6 components needed to establish, sustain and strengthen a health system, while allowing it to provide needed services, universal access to those services and universal coverage of health care benefits.
1) SERVICE DELIVERY
- Effective provision of health interventions to people needing them, with a minimum waste of resources.
- Goal: Improved health equity and health status, through organized and managed access to care.
2) HEALTH WORKFORCE
- Adequately trained and equipped health workers that provide fair and equitable access to needed services.
- Goal: Increased responsiveness by health workers and national plans to ensure quality workforce scale-up.
3) FINANCING
- Adequately funded health systems that ensure service delivery and protect systems from financial disaster.
- Goal: Financial risk protection while providing accessible services and sustainable scale-up.
4) MEDICAL PRODUCTS & TECHNOLOGIES
- Equitable access to safe, effective and affordable drugs, supplies, tools and other products.
- Goal: Increased responsiveness by providing reliable product stream and effective regulations.
5) HEALTH INFORMATION SYSTEM
- Production, analysis, dissemination, and use of reliable and timely information on health determinants, health systems and health status.
- Goal: Increased responsiveness to people by establishing health system metrics for surveying the population, monitoring the system, and disease surveillance.
6) LEADERSHIP & GOVERNANCE
- Institutes strategic, integrated policy frameworks; sets monitoring, regulative and accountability measures; and designs and coordinates coalitions and systems.
- Goal: Improved efficacy, providing policy guidance and defining the government’s role with regard to the other players.
You see... Health system is just like any other business systems. We need products, workers producing & selling the products, equipments needed to produce the products, sales & services, feedbacks from consumers, surveys or research to improve products' quality, management sector workers, and of course, a good financial flow.
In the main office building of the great chicken burger business, there are the boss, the CEOs (management team), the accountant (financing), the Sales & Promotion Manager and the Quality Manager (information), etc.. the clerks, and even the cleaner (supporting staffs).
Got my points? In health system, those components as listed above are vital & needed to be taken care of, as they work together to form what we call a health system.
Without healthcare workers, there won't be any healthcare services provided. Without a good leader, management, financing, medicines & medical equipments, a healthcare system will not be a good one. The product? Of course people come to a healthcare providers to seek healthcare, which may improve their health conditions~
Knowledge is power.
and He is the Most Powerful, for He knows everything :)
