HEALTH SERVICES:
WELL CHOSEN, WELL ORGANIZED?
ORGANIZATIONAL FAILINGS
J ust as the principal objective of a health system is to improve people’s health, the
chief function the system needs to perform is to deliver health services. The other
functions matter partly because they contribute to service provision. It is therefore a major
failing of the system when effective and affordable health interventions do not reach the
populations that would benefit from them. Sometimes this happens because the providers
have inadequate skills, or because of a lack of drugs and equipment: these are the consequence
of failures of training and investment, as discussed in Chapter 4, or of purchasing,
as discussed here and in Chapter 5. Sometimes services are not delivered to potential beneficiaries
because of price barriers: this is the result of a failure to finance the services fairly, as
discussed in Chapter 5. But often a failure of service delivery is due to dysfunctional organization
of the health system, even when the needed inputs exist and financial support is
adequate and fairly distributed. Such an organizational failing can result from the wrong
arrangements among different parties involved in service delivery, which in turn creates
perverse incentives and leads to mistaken choices about what services to provide, to whom
to deliver them, or how to ration when it is not possible to meet everyone’s needs or wants.
This chapter considers how to choose which services to provide, how to organize provision
and how to assure the right incentives for providers.
The complexities of organizing service provision are illustrated by the following example,
which is not at all unusual. A poor young woman walks to a rural government health
post with her sick baby. There is no doctor at the post, and there are no drugs. But a nurse
gives the mother an oral rehydration kit and explains how to use it. She tells the mother to
come back in a couple of days if the baby’s diarrhoea continues. The nurse sees only half a
dozen patients that day. Meanwhile, at the outpatient clinic of a community hospital about
an hour’s drive away, several hundred patients are waiting to be seen. Some are given
cursory examinations by the doctors there and are able to obtain any prescribed drugs at
the hospital dispensary. When the outpatient clinic closes, even though it is still early in the
day, patients who have not been seen are asked to return the next day, without being given
appointments. Some of the doctors then hurry off to work in a private “nursing home” or
clinic to supplement their salaries.
The doctors’ low pay and the absence of more qualified staff and drugs at the health post
might be