Freeing-up Healthcare: A guide to removing user fees

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Health systems reforms in Uganda: processes and outputs

The book provides an analytical review of the implementation of Uganda's health sector plan for the period 2000 - 2005 and generates policy and programme implications for improving the current 5-year plan ((2005 - 2010)

Poverty and user fees for public health care in low-income countries; lessons from Uganda and Cambodia [viewpoint]

Public health systems in most low-income countries are unfair to poor people. Clearly preventive and curative public health-care services, especially hospital services, are accessed by poor people less frequently than by those who are better off.1,2 This injustice is now high on the international agenda. A solution for this issue has some global dimensions, such as the need for a large transfer of resources from high-income to low-income countries.3 Yet, in terms of the best use of these supplementary resources, defi nite solutions should be developed in every country. National policy makers have strategic choices to make in their eff orts to reach poor people.4 One option that policy makers might consider is the removal of the fees charged to users by public health facilities. A key strategy in the 1980s was user fees,5 whic