[afro-nets] Unit Costs of Health Facilities 2009 Study: Call for Proposals

The World Health Organization (WHO) is currently accepting proposals from individuals/institutions who could provide data on unit costs in health care facilities.

BACKGROUND

The CHOICE (CHOosing Interventions that are Cost-Effective) project is a WHO initiative developed in 1998 with the objective of providing policy makers with the evidence for deciding on the interventions and programmes which maximize health for the available resources. As one of its services, WHO-CHOICE provides estimates on the cost per hospital stay by hospital level, outpatient visits, and cost of outpatient visits for the 14 Global Burden of Disease (GBD) regions and for the 192 WHO countries (http://www.who.int/choice/costs/en/) . The original data was collected and analyzed in early 2000 . Interested individuals/institutions are now being sought to provide datasets to be used to update the WHO-CHOICE unit cost estimates.

OBJECTIVE

Provide a dataset on unit costs of health care facilities (hospitals and/or health centres). The unit costs should have been collected within the past 8 years (starting 2000).

The data needed are:

1. Average unit costs per bed day (for health facilities with beds), admission and outpatient visit as an average for the whole facility and separately (if available) for the individual departments (wards/clinics) per facility.

2. for each unit cost included in the dataset:
a. Unit costs by input category ( salary, drugs, other supplies, capital)
b. Proportion of recurrent to total costs
c. Proportion of drugs to recurrent costs
d. Proportion of ancillary costs to recurrent costs

3. Average and recurrent unit costs of laboratory tests and diagnostic procedures.

4. Various determinants of costs and efficiency such as: average length of stay, occupancy rate, bed turn over, number of medical staff per bed, number of outpatient visits per medical staff per day, number of beds. This is required for the whole facility and separately (if possible) for each ward or clinic.

5. Utilization data, e.g., number of bed days, number of admissions, number of outpatient visits and number of ancillary services by type of service. This is required for the whole facility and separately for each department if possible.

APPLICATIONS

Interested applicants should fill in the attached sheet and submit this and/or requests for further information to:

Anderson Eduardo Stanciole
WHO-CHOICE
Email: stanciolea@who.int

Please include "Unit Costs Application 2009" in the subject line of your email.

Individuals with datasets of unit costs obtained from at least 30 health facilities at any level (primary, secondary or tertiary or a mix) are particularly encouraged to apply. The main objective is to obtain unit cost data from a large number of countries at different levels of development.

Receipt of each application will be acknowledged. Selected applicants will then be contacted after mid February to provide further detail on their datasets.

FUNDING AVAILABILITY

Limited funding is available to support the processing, re-formatting and preparation of datasets to meet WHO-CHOICE specifications. In this first wave, no funding is available for primary data collection of unit costs in health facilities.

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS

16 February 2009

Please feel free to distribute this announcement to others who might have datasets of unit costs of health facilities.

WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION
DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH SYSTEMS FINANCING

Unit Costs of Health Facilities 2009 Study: Scoping of available datasets

Name:_________________________________________
Institutional Affiliation:___________________________
E-mail address:__________________________________
Telephone number:_______________________________
Country that is the source of data___________________________

„X When was the unit cost data collected? _____________ (anytime from 2000 to the present)

„X How many health care facilities for which unit cost data are available:
a. Health facilities only with outpatient services ____
b. Health facilities primarily for outpatient services but with a limited number of day beds ________
c. Health facilities primarily for inpatient services for simple cases (district hospitals, etc) ___________
d. Health facilities primarily for inpatient services for referral cases _________

„X Could you provide data, for each facility surveyed, on:
a. number of bed days Y/N
b. number of admissions Y/N
c. number of outpatient visits Y/N
d. number of ancillary services Y/N

„X Could you provide data on determinants of costs and efficiency, for each facility surveyed, particularly
a. number of beds Y/N
b. average length of stay Y/N
c. occupancy rate Y/N
d. number of medical staff per bed Y/N
e. number of outpatient visits per medical staff per day Y/N

Please provide a list of additional variables which are available per facility in the dataset (e.g. number of specialist physicians in the facility, number of surgical procedures performed, etc). Or attach list of variables in a separate page.

--
Anderson Eduardo Stanciole
WHO-CHOICE
mailto:stanciolea@who.int