Progress Update: Development of Palliative Care From 2017 to 2020 in Five Countries in Eurasia.

CONTEXT: In the early 2000s, palliative care was largely unknown in the Eurasian region. For a period of twenty years starting around 2002, Open Society Foundations (OSF) supported palliative care pioneers in the region to establish palliative care services, train health providers, and advocate for the integration into health services. OBJECTIVES: To report on the development of palliative care in Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Tajikistan and Ukraine during the period 2017-2021 and explore the impact of OSF's sustained funding for palliative care in these countries. Activities and developments to 2017 were described in country-specific papers in 2018. METHODS: A retrospective case study analysis was used to examine how palliative care developed in each country. We reviewed theories of change, funding and advocacy strategies, implemented activities and interventions, and their outputs and outcomes, and compared them to legal, policy and service developments in practice. RESULTS: By the mid-2010s, each country had laid the foundations for rolling out palliative care-basic policies and guidelines were in place; palliative care medications were available; key health providers were trained; and training capacity and models of care had been created-but service availability remained limited. In subsequent years, advocates increasingly embraced public advocacy to hold governments accountable for meeting their commitments and to include palliative care in universal health insurance. By 2021, Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine had significantly scaled up service availability and palliative care was firmly embedded in universal health coverage in Moldova and Ukraine whereas progress in Georgia and Tajikistan was more modest. CONCLUSION: Experiences in these countries suggest that a strategy that initially emphasizes training, technical assistance, and engagement to create the building blocks for palliative care combined with or followed by public advocacy and campaigning to demand roll out of services can result in significant advances. Continued progress, however, is not guaranteed, especially considering the COVID-19 pandemic and dwindling donor support.

Republic of Moldova health system review.

The Health Systems in Transition (HiT) profiles are country-based reports that provide a detailed description of a health system and of policy initiatives in progress or under development. HiTs examine different approaches to the organization, financing and delivery of health services and the role of the main actors in health systems; describe the institutional framework, process, content and implementation of health and health care policies; and highlight challenges and areas that require more in-depth analysis. The reform of health financing in the Republic of Moldova began in earnest in 2004 with the introduction of a mandatory health insurance (MHI) system. Since then, MHI has become a sustainable financing mechanism that has improved the technical and allocative efficiency of the system as well as overall transparency. This has helped to further consolidate the prioritization of primary care in the system, which has been bas ed on a family medicine model since the 1990s. Hospital stock in the country has been reduced since independence as the country inherited a Semashko health system with excessive infrastructure, but there is still room for efficiency gains, particularly through the consolidation of specialist services in the capital city. The rationalization of duplicated specialized services, therefore, remains a key challenge facing the Moldovan health system. Other challenges include health workforce shortages (particularly in rural areas) and improving equity in financing and access to care by reducing out of pocket (OOP) payments. OOP spending on health is dominated by the cost of pharmaceuticals and this is currently a core focus of reform efforts.

Republic of Moldova: health system review

The Health Systems in Transition (HiT) profiles are country-based reports that provide a detailed description of a health system and of policy initiatives in progress or under development. HiTs examine different approaches to the organization, financing and delivery of health services and the role of the main actors in health systems; describe the institutional framework, process, content and implementation of health and health care policies; and highlight challenges and areas that require more in-depth analysis. The reform of health financing in the Republic of Moldova began in earnest in 2004 with the introduction of a mandatory health insurance (MHI) system. Since then, MHI has become a sustainable financing mechanism that has improved the technical and allocative efficiency of the system as well as overall transparency. This has helped to further consolidate the prioritization of primary care in the system, which has been based on a family medicine model since the 1990s. Hospital stock has been reduced since independence as the country inherited a Semashko health system with excessive infrastructure, but there is still room for efficiency gains, particularly through the consolidation of specialist services in the capital city. The rationalization of duplicated specialized services, therefore, remains a key challenge facing the Moldovan health system. Other challenges include health workforce shortages (particularly in rural areas) and improving equity in financing and access to care by reducing out-of-pocket (OOP) payments. OOP spending on health is dominated by the cost of pharmaceuticals and this is currently a core focus of reform efforts.