In preparation of People's Health Assembly II - part 13
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Making health systems more equitable
By Davidson R Gwatkin, Abbas Bhuiya, Cesar G Victora
Lancet 2004; 364: 1273-80 - Volume 364, Number 9441 02 October
2004
Download as Adobe PDF file (8 pp. 103 kB):
http://pdf.thelancet.com/pdfdownload?uid=llan.364.9441.review_and_opinion.30888.1&x=x.pdf
"Health systems are consistently inequitable, providing more and
higher quality services to the well-off, who need them less,
than to the poor, who are unable to obtain them. In the absence
of a concerted effort to ensure that health systems reach disad-
vantaged groups more effectively, such inequities are likely to
continue.
Yet this situation need not be accepted as inevitable, for there
are many promising measures that might be pursued: establishment
of goals for improved coverage in the poor, rather than in en-
tire populations, and use of those goals to direct planning to-
ward the needs of the disadvantaged; use of one or more of the
several techniques that seem to have been effective in at least
some of the settings where they have been tried; and empowerment
of poor clients to have a more central role in health system de-
sign and operation."