Carolin Temple-Bird, Practical steps for developing health care technology policy, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RE, UK, 2000, ISBN 1 85864 291 4, 138 pages, ?25.

✍ Scribed by Susie Perera

• Book ID: 102258395
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 44 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0749-6753
• DOI: 10.1002/hpm.612

✦ Synopsis

The book is essentially a manual for policy development and consists of a series of guidelines that have been organized into six steps for the development of Policy on Health Care Technology. The term health care technology has been applied in a very broad sense, which may be equipment, communication systems, record systems, maintenance kits, energy sources, glassware, transport etc.

The author is a clinical engineer and no doubt has a good technical background plus extensive experience in working with the many stakeholders of policy formulation. This experience is re¯ected in the practical suggestions mentioned throughout the text. Although the practical experience has been from several African countries, the problems uncovered are similar in most developing countries.

The lack of clear policy guidance is re¯ected in many developing countries where high tech equipment is often donated with poor understanding of the functional situation or the people using the technology in the developing country. There is usually a mismatch of what the equipment can do and the person who can use it. High tech equipment cannot be properly placed in hospital units that did not plan for it at the time of construction and trivial malfunction leads to long delays of non-use due to the lack of expertise in maintenance. Often lack of equipment inventories leads to essential costly equipment lying around in some corner, unknown to potential users for long periods. All this seems familiar to the author.

It is obvious that guidelines have been developed with both decentralized management and the lack of technical expertise in the ®eld of health care technology in developing countries ®rmly in mind.

The six steps mentioned emphasize the following issues:

Step 1Ðdescribes resource needs (people, time and funds), the Task Force and Steering Committee.

Step 2Ðdescribes the overall process, concepts and approaches, i.e. summarizes the content in steps 3±6. Although the book is intended for all who are involved in health technology policy planning including those at the highest level and health care technical managers, this step provides a useful summary for people at the highest level who may not have suf®cient time to read through all the steps.

Step 3Ðdescribes how a comprehensive situation analysis should be carried out to outline resource availability, identify the constraints which exist to their effective use