Sara Bennett, Barbara McPake, Anne Mills (eds), Private health providers in developing countries, serving the public interest? London and New York: Zed publishers, 1997. ISBN: I85649 496 9, 318 pages. Price £39.95 hb; £12.95 pb.
✍ Scribed by William Newbrander
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 68 KB
- Volume
- 13
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0749-6753
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Recent years have seen changes in long-standing ideological beliefs and political systems and institutions, a dramatic shift in the attitudes of countries toward the role of government and private sector in planning and delivering health services. These changes have been brought about by concerns about the ability of governments to adequately ®nance health services, the poor performance of the public health system with respect to eciency of services delivery and quality of services, and the desire to expand choices available to the public and patients. It is this context where the book Private Health Providers in Developing Countries, Serving the Public Interest? makes a signi®cant contribution to the debate. It provides health care policy makers with practical information on the background of the issues surrounding the public sector debate on the proper role of the private sector in health. As the authors point out many suggestions have been issued to developing countries on how to deal with the private sector. For example, it is often suggested that by promoting the private sector and encouraging the more wealthy to use the services of an improved private sector, this will decrease services utilized by that group from public sector facilities, thus there will be more resources for the public sector to devote to the disadvantaged populations. However, there has been little empirical evidence to validate the positions put forward by the international ®nancial and donor agencies. In particular, little has been known about the private sector, its size, its activities, and the quality and eciency of services provided by private providers. This weak information base, upon which international donors have recommended the promotion of the private sector in social sectors, was the impetus for the research presented in this book.
The authors felt there were many prescriptions for governments on policy actions for dealing with private sector in health but little of it was based on validation by objective data. They sought to ®ll this void yet ensure that the information could be widely disseminated. They succeeded in this attempt in that the material presented in the book is accessible to most policy makers and managers because of the attempt to use nontechnical language. It does provide the principles of economic theory which underpin the arguments for the expanded role of the private sector, which have been advanced.
The book consists of 18 chapters based on the work of 35 contributors. It was an outgrowth of a collaborative research network of the Health Economics and Financing Programme of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The content of the book represents a portion of the research results of that network which were presented at the second meeting of this group in 1995.
The book is structured with the ®rst chapter laying out the key issues on the debate of the public and private sector mix, some of the policy prescriptions which have been oered in the recent past, and the relative merits of those solutions which have been proered. The remainder of the book is organized into three main sections, with the initial chapter of each section presenting the overview of the issues dealt with and introducing other evidence beyond what is presented by the individual chapters in that