Health Policy and Financing

Overview

This Health Policy and Financing course at the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) is tropEd accredited  and is intended for public health professionals looking to elevate their capabilities in healthcare financing. It can be followed as a stand-alone course or as part of the Master in International Health or Master in Public Health programmes.

What you'll study

This module takes an in-depth look at important issues and current debates in health policy, health economics and health financing. 

Among these are the vital discussion points of decentralisation, the public-private mix, international finance of health goods, aid effectiveness, TRIPS, community participation, health insurance and governance of health systems.

The influence that certain actors, such as the international donor community and consumer groups, have on the health policy agenda is explored, and recent influential reports concerning health policy are discussed.

Objectives

At the end of the module the participants should be able to:

• discuss and apply a framework for policy analysis, considering effectiveness, equity and implementation challenges.
• appraise alternative (and innovative) modes of financing health systems, including the role of external aid and donors.
• analyse the key characteristics of health system decentralization in low and middle income countries – importance, diversity, trade-offs, context specificity; and propose broad strategies for making decentralization more effective.
• examine and discuss the meaning and importance of community participation in relation to health systems, and particularly its role towards achieving better accountability and governance.
• analyse comparative advantages and disadvantages of public and private roles within health systems, across functions and institutions dealing with the various building blocks; and discuss in particular, the role of contracting and performance based finance.