"Measuring health-care access and quality has become an increasingly important priority alongside its ascent in global health policy. In particular, the use of amenable mortality—deaths from causes that should not occur in the presence of effective medical care—to approximate national levels of personal health-care access and quality has gained greater traction.6–15 Amenable mortality metrics are thought to provide a strong signal of what can or should be addressed by the receipt of effective health care, and thus performance on overall personal health-care access and quality. Combining such measures with those capturing avertable or preventable health outcomes (ie, burden that can…
WHO World Health Report 2000: Overview and Defense
"Differentiation between attainment and efficiency in health systems is crucial. Every society should be concerned about attainment of standards of health, responsiveness, inequalities in both of these, and fairness in financial contribution. What explains variation in these five key outcomes is an important scientific issue. Table 9 in the World Health Report 2000,9 contained the best available evidence on attainment of these outcomes. But, what was the contribution of the health system to these outcomes? And how efficiently have resources invested in the health system been used? Figure 3 shows the theory of overall efficiency. Country A could have achieved…
WHO World Health Report: Overview
"To assess a health system, one must measure five things: the overall level of health; the distribution of health in the population; the overall level of responsiveness; the distribution of responsiveness; and the distribution of financial contribution. For each one, WHO has used existing sources or newly generated data to calculate measures of attainment for the countries where information could be obtained. These data were also used to estimate values when particular numbers were judged unreliable, and to estimate attainment and performance for all other Member States. Several of these measures are novel and are explained in detail in the…