The overall indicator of attainment, like the five specific achievements which compose
it, is an absolute measure. It says how well a country has done in reaching the different
goals, but it says nothing about how that outcome compares to what might have been
achieved with the resources available in the country. It is achievement relative to resources
that is the critical measure of a health system’s performance.
Thus if Sweden enjoys better health than Uganda – life expectancy is almost exactly
twice as long – that is in large part because it spends exactly 35 times as much per capita on
its health system. But Pakistan spends almost precisely the same amount per person as
Uganda, out of an income per person that is close to Uganda’s, and yet it has a life expectancy
almost 25 years higher. This is the crucial comparison: why are health outcomes in
Pakistan so much better, for the same expenditure? And it is health expenditure that matters,
not the country’s total income, because one society may choose to spend less of a given
income on health than another. Each health system should be judged according to the
resources actually at its disposal, not according to other resources which in principle could
have been devoted to health but were used for something else.
Health outcomes have often been assessed in relation to inputs such as the number of
doctors or hospital beds per unit of population. This approach indicates what these inputs
actually produce, but it tells little about the health system’s potential – what it could do if it
used the same level of financial resources to produce and deploy different numbers and
combinations of professionals, buildings, equipment and consumables. In these comparisons,
the right measure of resources is money, since that is used to buy all the real inputs.
To assess relative performance requires a scale, one end of which establishes an upper limit or “frontier”, corresponding to the most that could be expected of a health system. This
frontier – derived using information from many countries but with a specific value for each
country – represents the level of attainment which a health system might achieve, but
which no country surpasses. At the other extreme, a lower boundary needs to be defined
for the least that could be demanded of the health system (17). With this scale it is possible to see
how much of this potential has been realized. In other words, comparing actual attainment
with potential shows how far from its own frontier of maximal performance is each country’s
health system.
WHO has estimated two relations between outcomes and health system resources. One
estimate relates resources only to average health status (disability-adjusted life expectancy,
DALE), which makes it somewhat comparable to many previous analyses of performance
in health. The other relates resources to the overall attainment measure based on all five
objectives. The same value of total resources is used for a country in both cases, because
there is no way to identify expenditure as being directed to producing health services, determining
responsiveness or making the financing more or less fair. The same is true of
resources used to improve the distribution of health or responsiveness, rather than the
average level.