Recommended readings
Health governance: concepts, experience, and programming options
Interventions to improve governance in health systems
Authors:
D.W. Brinkerhoff; T.J. Bossert
Publisher:
Health Systems 20/20, 2008
This policy brief produced by USAID provides an overview of governance in health systems. This refers to developing and putting in place effective rules for policies, programmes and activities related to fulfilling public health functions. The paper identifies health governance issues and challenges and reviews some experience with interventions to improve health governance. Interventions aimed to: improve the policy process in the health sector by promoting more effective stakeholder engagement, enhancing participation at a variety of levels to promote more effective governance of health programmes, and improving accountability and transparency and reducing corruption in the health sector.
The paper concludes that good health governance emerges from the actions and linkages among the state, providers of health services and citizens. Health governance improvements – through their impacts on rules, roles, responsibilities and institutions – affect the availability, quality, distribution and utilisation of health services. Efforts to increase the quality of health governance constitute worthwhile and effective undertakings for improving health systems functioning and for increasing the provision and utilisation of health services.
