A study on Ghana’s health expenditure financing, has shown that although a chunk of the funding are from government through the health insurance scheme, a large amount also comes from individuals at health facility levels.

The Ghana Health Service (GHS) and the World Health Organization (WHO), however see the catastrophic spending (out-of-pocket payments) of these individuals on healthcare as a huge gap that needs urgent redress.

This, they said, could prevent full access to key services, particularly at the primary healthcare level, and stall the attainment of Universal Health Coverage (UHC), as well as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Mr Daniel Osei, a Deputy Director, Office of the Director-General, GHS, at a dissemination workshop of the Malaria Expenditure Tracking Study results on Wednesday, said a large amount of government spending (between 52 to 58 percent) was found to be towards curative within the period between 2013 and 2017, than preventive health.
He said it was important for government to rather channel more resources into ensuring preventive health, to prevent severe illnesses resulting from poor lifestyle behaviours such as lack of exercising, poor dietary practices, as well as alcohol and tobacco abuse among others.

The study, he said, therefore advocated for more spending on specific disease preventive interventions such as the distribution of Insecticide Treated Bed Nets and Indoor Residual Spraying in the case of malaria, which had proven to be very effective in reducing morbidity and mortality in children and pregnant women.

“This will help reduce the high government expenditure in financing healthcare, by cutting down the number of outpatient attendance and improve the health status of the population,” he said.

Mr Osei explained that the Malaria Expenditure Tracking Study, was the first of such disease specific research to be conducted by the GHS in collaboration with the WHO and other stakeholders using the global standardized National Health Accounts (NHA) tool, to provide new and unutilized data to catalyst change for decision makers.

He said the study was an effort to describe the financial flows associated with the consumption of healthcare by resident population of a country or region, to look at the sources of funding, disbursement, beneficiaries, and service providers among other things.

The objective, was to support the availability of high-quality expenditure data on malaria control using produced National Health Accounts framework, and to further encourage and support knowledge sharing between the National Malaria Control Programme and local health accounts team.

Mr Osei indicated that the results, would be shared with stakeholders both internally and globally.

Dr Francis C. Kasolo, the WHO Country Representative, in a statement read on his behalf, said the Malaria Expenditure Tracking project aimed to support efforts to make malaria specific estimates publicly available in the Global Health Expenditure database (GHED) and WHO Global Malaria Programme (GMP) data repository for the World Malaria Reports.

He also stressed that making progress towards UHC objectives would require countries to commit sustained resources, and their success would rely on effective and equitable resource allocation and prioritization.

“It is therefore critical to first gain a better understanding of disease-specific financing, in terms of the level and mix of funding sources, channels and trends over time,” he said.

He re-assured the country of the WHO’s commitment to support the consolidation of the gains, and expand the institutionalization efforts of the NHA process.

This, he said, would be done through measures including the creation of better communication channels between the different levels such as national, regional and districts, in order to ensure that programmes and agencies were accurately informed and involved in the NHA study through financial reporting.

He also called for the exploring the mobilization of additional resources for health from alternative sources based on the results of the NHA, as well as deepening of private sector engagement to explore such financing potential through the dissemination of the study results.