African health financing discovers the cost of closing everything
First, African health financing has reached its ingenious phase. Some now praise closed clinics for their lack of electricity bills. However, aid cuts and chronic underinvestment have made the system lean enough to fall through a crack.
Meanwhile, WHO says clinics are closing. Health workers lose jobs, and supply chains are breaking. Consequently, efficiency specialists feel disappointed. They had hoped medicine could arrive through a colourful arrow between two PowerPoint rectangles.
Moreover, warnings about African health partnerships had already offered a clue. Therefore, nobody can deliver care after the people and supplies vanish. A cupboard then becomes less a clinic than a very quiet prophecy.
In addition, patients provide the main health funding in 27 African countries. In ten, they cover more than half of spending. Thus, a broken leg gets the relaxed financial atmosphere of buying a sandwich at an airport.
Patients invited to finance their own rescue
“We are building a personal health partnership,” said Dr Prudence Ledger Squeak, WHO Adjunct Secretary for Saying the Quiet Part in a Softer Voice. “Patients bring the money. Clinics bring whatever remains after the money has left.”
Meanwhile, debt costs squeeze government budgets. Conference panels then produce diagrams about transformation. One delegate said the arrows showed progress. Another thought they were showing where the nurses had gone.
WHO urges countries to improve efficiency and find new revenue. However, that may prove difficult. A health worker cannot vaccinate a spreadsheet, even with merged cells and a reassuring shade of blue.
Finally, delegates agreed that health is an investment, not a cost. Patients returned to clinics without staff, medicines or opening hours. Instead, they took comfort from the knowledge that someone had polished a sentence very carefully.
Officials promised sustainable financing. Thus, it will arrive once somebody finds a model that does not require ill people to bring a wallet, a torch and possibly their own nurse.
Read the real story: WHO’s remarks on African health financing
