iHOPE - 1st Scientific Advisory Group Meeting

Meeting Objective:

• The Scientific Advisory Group (SAG) will review the iHOPE project, its overall objectives and project design and give advice.
• The SAG will approve an agreed project design and implementation plan

Meeting Outcomes 

• A draft SAG report
• Approval of the project design and implementation plan 

National Health Accounts preparation requires disaggregated information on OOP payments by providers, diseases, age, gender, and functions. Such information is normally not well captured in national general surveys. Further, the way data is collected does not allow comparability across countries and/or over time analyses due to heterogeneity in the way OOP payments variables are collected. There are currently two general sources of out-of-pocket health spending (OOPs) in low- and middle-income countries: general household consumption surveys with or without a separate health module, and health surveys with an expenditure module. The distribution of expenditures across diseases gives a de-facto reflection of the priorities of national policymakers and development partners as well as the needs and capacity of households. With increasing demands for disease-specific health expenditures the objectives of the project are to develop a standardized set of core questions to determine the level of OOPs; test and develop interim/alternative approaches to House Hold surveys; and provide a socio-economic context to interpret OOPs   

The objectives of the project include the following

1. Improve estimation of OOPs in a household survey
2. Develop a set of questions to facilitate OOP specific disease measurement
3. To test and develop interim/alternative approaches to HH surveys
4. To provide a socio-economic context to interpret OOPs

Funded by the Gates Foundation, INDEPTH will organise the first meeting of the Scientific Advisory Group (SAG) of the Project in Geneva. The SAG is a group of international experts who will provide independent scientific advise to the project.