Healthcare in Ethiopia
As literacy and socioeconomic status improves in Ethiopia, the demand for quality service is also increasing.
But there is also significant growth in noncommunicable diseases (cardiovascular conditions, cancers, mental illness, etc) and injury.
The prioritized initiatives are mobilizing adequate resources mainly from domestic sources, reducing out-of-pock et spending at the point of service use, enhancing efficiency and effectiveness, strengthening public private partnership and capacity development for improved health care financing.
These reforms include: revenue retention and use at the health facility level; systematizing fee waiver system; standardization of exempted services; setting and revision of user fees; allowing establishment of private wing in public hospitals; outsourcing of non-clinical services ; and, promotion of health facility autonomy through establishment of a governance body; and establishment of health insurance system.
While mobilizing sufficient public resources and organizing pooling to maximize re-distributive capacity are essential for achieving equitable and affordable health care access for all, it is of equal importance that collected resources be efficiently used in order to maximize and sustain the provision of benefits for the population.
It was only during Emperor Menelik’s time (1889-1913) that the first foreign-trained Ethiopian medical doctor, Hakim Workneh Eshete, began practicing medicine in Addis Ababa.
[7] Throughout the 1990s, the government, as part of its reconstruction program, devoted ever-increasing amounts of funding to the social and health sectors, which brought corresponding improvements in school enrolments, adult literacy, and infant mortality rates.
In 2000 the country counted one hospital bed per 4,900 population and more than 27,000 people per primary health care facility.
The policy fully reorganized the health services delivery system as contributing positively to the country's overall socioeconomic development efforts.
[8] In 2002 the government embarked on a poverty reduction program that called for outlays in education, health, sanitation, and water.
However, these trainees encountered a lack of adequate facilities, including classrooms, libraries, water, and latrines.
[9] In January 2005, the government began distributing antiretroviral drugs, hoping to reach up to 30,000 HIV-infected adults.
Ethiopia's main health problems are said to be communicable diseases caused by poor sanitation and malnutrition.
[14] Only 20 percent of children nationwide have been immunized against all six vaccine-preventable diseases: tuberculosis, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, polio, and measles.
It is a community-based intervention designed to make basic health services accessible to the rural and underserved segments of the population.
[17][18] It was planned to cover all rural kebeles with the aim of achieving universal primary health care coverage by 2008.
Supportive supervision technical, reference books for rural HEP and manuals for school health program were prepared.
In order to expand the Urban Health Extension program in seven regions of the country, 15 packages along with implementation manual were developed and distributed for implementation in Tigray, Amhara, Oromia, the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region, Harari, Dire Dawa, and Addis Ababa.
These regions have trained and deployed a total of 2,319 Urban Health Extension workers achieving 42% of the required number.
The program involves women in decision-making processes and promotes community ownership, empowerment, autonomy and self-reliance.
The plan was to attain a 100% general potential health service coverage by availing 3200 centres through construction, equipping and furnishing of 253 new ones and upgrading 1,457 HSs to HC level and also upgrading of 30% of HC to enable them perform emergency obstetric and neonatal care services.
[22] As shown in the table above, this is the source of health financing that can be seen in Ethiopia, which explains that the donors, households and government have almost equal expenditures.
The SIH system doesn't include 85% poorest society of Ethiopian living in a rural area, so I have given attention to CBHI.
[27] In addition to this, it has other achievements like contributing to women's empowerment and its impact on equity and reduction in financial hardship not yet studied.
