Kazakhstan: addressing the challenges of monitoring health services delivery
WHO/Alexandr Gordon
Kazakhstan is taking its first steps towards addressing the challenges involved in monitoring health services delivery. On 24 November 2017, teams from Kazakhstan’s Republican Centre for Health Development and Republican E-Health Centre of the Ministry of Health, together with representatives of the WHO European Centre for Primary Health Care (WECPHC), attended a practical 1-day workshop to plan the process of pre-testing indicators for monitoring health services delivery as part of the implementation of the European Framework for Action on Integrated Health Services Delivery.
Monitoring health services delivery in the WHO European Region faces unique challenges, including:
- gaps in the availability of data on service delivery;
- a limited range of regularly reported service delivery indicators;
- lack of specificity to the European Region, especially for the systems of countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States;
- delays in adapting and developing indicators in response to changing health needs.
In late 2016, the WECPHC (1) began working on a response to these challenges with a monitoring framework for health services delivery. The monitoring framework corresponds to the European Framework for Action on Integrated Health Services Delivery endorsed by Member States at the 66th session of the WHO Regional Committee for Europe. This monitoring effort aims to establish a Region-wide baseline on the status of primary health care to be reported back to Member States in 2020.
The teams met at the WHO Country Office in Kazakhstan to begin discussions on evaluating the indicators for primary health care performance and capacity proposed in the monitoring framework. The pre-test aims to collect in-country information on the feasibility and applicability of the proposed indicators.
Luigi Migliorini, interim Head of the WECPHC; Oleg Chestnov, newly appointed WHO Representative and Head of the WHO Country Office in Kazakhstan; and Ainur Toksanovna Ayipkhanova, General Director of the Republican Centre for Health Development, Kazakhstan, launched the pre-testing process.
The results of this exercise will be presented at the first meeting of the steering committee for this work in early 2018.
The workshop included a presentation by the Republican Centre for Health Development and the Republican E-Health Centre on their main activities in primary health care and on monitoring health services delivery in general. The WECPHC also provided participants with an overview of the newly published "Roadmap to monitoring health services delivery in the WHO European Region" and a detailed walk-through of the monitoring framework.
Following this workshop, the next steps in the pre-testing process include:
- formalizing the appointment of a country focal point for the pre-test;
- identifying key stakeholders from the government, other national actors and providers, and patient representatives to participate in the process;
- exchanging relevant data and information between the teams.
A technical workshop to kick off pre-testing data collection will take place early next year.
(1) This group includes Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Republic of Moldova, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.
