Can social accountability improve access to free public health care for the poor? Analysis of three Health Equity Fund configurations in Cambodia, 2015-17.

Within the context of universal health coverage, community participation has been identified as instrumental to facilitate access to health services. Social accountability whereby citizens hold providers and policymakers accountable is one popular approach. This article describes one example, that of Community-Managed Health Equity Funds (CMHEFs), as an approach to community engagement in Cambodia to improve poor people's use of their entitlement to fee-free health care at public health facilities. The objectives of this article are to describe the size of its operations and its ability to enable poor people continued access to health care. Using data collected routinely, we compare the uptake of curative health services by eligible poor people under three configurations of Health Equity Funds (HEFs) during a 24-month period (July 2015-June 2017): Standard HEF that operated without community engagement, Mature CMHEFs established years before the study period and New CMHEFs initiated just before the study period. One year within the study, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) stopped operating the HEF nationwide and only the community-participation aspects of New CMHEF continued receiving technical assistance from an NGO. Using utilization figures for curative services by non-poor people for comparison, following the cessation of HEF management by the NGOs, outpatient consultation figures declined for all three configurations in comparison with the year before but only significantly for Standard HEF. The three HEF configurations experienced a highly statistically significant reduction in monthly inpatient admissions following halting of NGO management of HEFs. This study shows that enhancing access to free health care through social accountability is optimized at health centres through engagement of a wide range of community representatives. Such effect at hospitals was only observed to a limited extent, suggesting the need for more engagement of hospital management authorities in social accountability mechanisms.

Alma Ata after 40 years: Primary Health Care and Health for All-from consensus to complexity.

Forty years ago, the 134 national government members of the WHO signed the Alma Ata Declaration. The Declaration made Primary Health Care (PHC) the official health policy of all members countries. Emerging from the conference was the consensus that health was a human right based on the principles of equity and community participation. Alma Ata broadened the perception of health beyond doctors and hospitals to social determinants and social justice. In the following years implementing this policy confronted many challenges. These included: (1) whether PHC should focus on vertical disease programmes where interventions had the most possibility of success or on comprehensive programmes that addressed social, economic and political factors that influenced health improvements; (2) whether primary care and PHC are interchangeable approaches to health improvements; (3) how equity and community participation for health improvements would be institutionalised; and (4) how financing for PHC would be possible. Experiences in implementation over the last 40 years provide evidence of how these challenges have been met and what succeeded and what had failed. Lessons from these experiences include the need to understand PHC as a process rather than a blueprint, to understand the process must consider context, culture, politics, economics and social concerns, and therefore, to recognise the process is complex. PHC needs to be examined within evaluation frameworks that address complexity. Recent developments in monitoring and evaluation have begun to respond to this need. They include realist evaluation and implementation research.

The challenge of complexity in evaluating health policies and programs: the case of women's participatory groups to improve antenatal outcomes.

BACKGROUND: During the last years, randomized designs have been promoted as the cornerstone of evidence-based policymaking. Also in the field of community participation, Random Control Trials (RCTs) have been the dominant design, used for instance to examine the contribution of community participation to health improvement. We aim at clarifying why RCTs and related (quasi-) experimental designs may not be the most appropriate approach to evaluate such complex programmes. RESULTS: We argue that the current methodological debate could be more fruitful if it would start from the position that the choice of designs should fit the nature of the program and research questions rather than be driven by methodological preferences. We present how realist evaluation, a theory-driven approach to research and evaluation, is a relevant methodology that could be used to assess whether and how community participation works. Using the realist evaluation approach to examine the relationship between participation and action of women groups and antenatal outcomes would enable evaluators to examine in detail the underlying mechanisms which influence actual practices and outcomes, as well as the context conditions required to make it work. CONCLUSIONS: Realist research in fact allows opening the black boxes of "community" and "participation" in order to examine the role they play in ensuring cost-effective, sustainable interventions. This approach yields important information for policy makers and programme managers considering how such programs could be implemented in their own setting.

Examining the links between community participation and health outcomes: a review of the literature.

As a key principle of Primary Health Care (PHC) and Health Systems Reform, community participation has a prominent place in the current global dialogue. Participation is not only promoted in the context of provision and utilization of health services. Advocates also highlight participation as a key factor in the wider context of the importance of social determinants of health and health as a human right. However, the evidence that directly links community participation to improved health status is not strong. Its absence continues to be a barrier for governments, funding agencies and health professionals to promote community participation. The purpose of this article is to review research seeking to link community participation with improved health status outcomes programmes. It updates a review undertaken by the author in 2009. The search includes published articles in the English language and examines the evidence of in the context of health care delivery including services and promotion where health professionals have defined the community's role. The results show that in most studies community participation is defined as the intervention seeking to identify a direct causal link between participation and improved health status modeled on Randomized Control studies (RCT). The majority of studies show it is not possible to examine the link because there is no standard definition of 'community' and 'participation'. Where links are found, they are situation-specific and are unpredictable and not generalizable. In the discussion, an alternative research framework is proposed arguing that community participation is better understood as a process. Once concrete interventions are identified (i.e. improved birth outcomes) then the processes producing improved health status outcomes can be examined. These processes may include and can lead to community uptake, ownership and sustainability for health improvements. However, more research is needed to ensure their validity.

Primary health care, now and forever? A case study of a paradigm change.

The year 2008 marked the 30th anniversary of the Alma Ata Declaration that made Primary Health Care (PHC) the global health policy of member states of the World Health Organization (WHO). Why has PHC remained relevant? In part, this is because of growing evidence that health is a result of social, political, and economic environments, not merely of control of diseases and infirmities through interventions based on biomedical science. Using the conceptual framework developed by Thomas Kuhn, this article traces the emergence of PHC as a new paradigm based on social determinants to address poor health among populations (not individuals), especially those that are low-income. It traces the history of PHC over the last 30 years, focusing on policy developments within WHO. It selects three issues: definitions of PHC; financing and delivery of health services, including lay people's involvement in health care, as examples of the new paradigm; and opposition by those whose concept of health is based on the control of disease and infirmities paradigm. The article concludes by asking whether PHC will continue to be relevant and whether the question mark in the title of this article will be removed in the future.

A renewed focus on primary health care: revitalize or reframe?

The year 2008 celebrated 30 years of Primary Health Care (PHC) policy emerging from the Alma Ata Declaration with publication of two key reports, the World Health Report 2008 and the Report of the Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. Both reports reaffirmed the relevance of PHC in terms of its vision and values in today's world. However, important challenges in terms of defining PHC, equity and empowerment need to be addressed.This article takes the form of a commentary reviewing developments in the last 30 years and discusses the future of this policy. Three challenges are put forward for discussion (i) the challenge of moving away from a narrow technical bio-medical paradigm of health to a broader social determinants approach and the need to differentiate primary care from primary health care; (ii) The challenge of tackling the equity implications of the market oriented reforms and ensuring that the role of the State in the provision of welfare services is not further weakened; and (iii) the challenge of finding ways to develop local community commitments especially in terms of empowerment.These challenges need to be addressed if PHC is to remain relevant in today's context. The paper concludes that it is not sufficient to revitalize PHC of the Alma Ata Declaration but it must be reframed in light of the above discussion.

Chasing the dragon: Developing indicators for the assessment of community participation in health programmes.

Community participation was identified as one of the key components of Primary Health Care as articulated in the Alma Ata declaration of 1978 and is enjoying a renewal of interest in both low and high income countries. There remains, however, an on-going challenge in how to assess its role in achieving health improvements. This is largely due to the multiplicity of definitions of community participation, which has made it difficult to evaluate its impact on desired programme outcomes, such as uptake and sustainability, as well as broader health improvements. This paper addresses this challenge by first defining a continuum of community participation that captures its many forms, and then incorporates this into an evaluation framework that enables an analysis of the process of participation and links this with health and programme outcomes. The continuum of participation and framework is based upon the spidergram of Rifkin, Muller, and Bichmann (1988), but modified in the light of the growing literature on community participation and also in relation to our original requirements to evaluate the role of community participation in nutrition-related child survival programmes. A case-study is presented to provide a worked example of the evaluation framework and its utility in the evaluation of community participation. While this is a literature-based and retrospective analysis, it demonstrates how the evaluation tool enables a nuanced analysis of the different ways in which communities can participate in the delivery of health-related interventions. It could be used prospectively by those involved in programme design and implementation to further our understanding of community participation and its relationship with health outcomes, as well as key programme outcomes, such as sustainability.

Alma-Ata 30 years on: revolutionary, relevant, and time to revitalise.

In this paper, we revisit the revolutionary principles-equity, social justice, and health for all; community participation; health promotion; appropriate use of resources; and intersectoral action-raised by the 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration, a historic event for health and primary health care. Old health challenges remain and new priorities have emerged (eg, HIV/AIDS, chronic diseases, and mental health), ensuring that the tenets of Alma-Ata remain relevant. We examine 30 years of changes in global policy to identify the lessons learned that are of relevance today, particularly for accelerated scale-up of primary health-care services necessary to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, the modern iteration of the "health for all" goals. Health has moved from under-investment, to single disease focus, and now to increased funding and multiple new initiatives. For primary health care, the debate of the past two decades focused on selective (or vertical) versus comprehensive (horizontal) delivery, but is now shifting towards combining the strengths of both approaches in health systems. Debates of community versus facility-based health care are starting to shift towards building integrated health systems. Achievement of high and equitable coverage of integrated primary health-care services requires consistent political and financial commitment, incremental implementation based on local epidemiology, use of data to direct priorities and assess progress, especially at district level, and effective linkages with communities and non-health sectors. Community participation and intersectoral engagement seem to be the weakest strands in primary health care. Burgeoning task lists for primary health-care workers require long-term human resource planning and better training and supportive supervision. Essential drugs policies have made an important contribution to primary health care, but other appropriate technology lags behind. Revitalisng Alma-Ata and learning from three decades of experience is crucial to reach the ambitious goal of health for all in all countries, both rich and poor.

Health sector reforms in Kenya: an examination of district level planning.

The paper examines health sector reforms in Kenya at the district level based on the Government of Kenya's Health Policy Framework of 1994. The authors present the context of and historical perspective to health sector reforms in Kenya and discuss the major reform policies including decentralization to the district level. The authors then review intended policy outcomes, investigating assumptions on which the implementation and effectiveness of the reform agenda at the local level are based. The authors argue that emphasis on outcomes rather than process has not supported sustainable reforms or achieved the government's goal of improving health and ensuring equity for the citizens of the country.

A framework linking community empowerment and health equity: it is a matter of CHOICE.

This paper presents a framework to explore the relationship between health equity and community empowerment. It traces the progression of the concept of participation to the present term of empowerment and the links among empowerment, equity, and health outcomes. It argues that the relationship can best be described by using the acronym CHOICE (Capacity-building, Human rights, Organizational sustainability, Institutional accountability, Contribution, and Enabling environment). Based on the concept of development as freedom put forward by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, the paper describes how each factor illustrates the relationship between equity and empowerment in positive health outcomes, giving appropriate examples. In conclusion, it is suggested that these factors might form the basis of a tool to assess the relationship between equity and empowerment and its impact on health outcomes.