The health planner's toolkit : Assessing need

Nonetheless, despite the processes health resource allocation continued to be based largely and tools that exist and the new prominence of health on patterns of past service provision and utilisation.4 needs assessment, there are still choices to be made As responsibility for managing the delivery of health about the type of process, the scope, the concepts and Figure 6:. [...] Choices must be own notion of health need, then assess its resource made regarding the definition of health need to be used, requirements on that basis, but comparative need often the theory of health to follow and the indicators by substitutes as a gauge of unmet need in the absence of which health needs will be measured. [...] The demand can be thought of as the is sought: each of the types of need listed above has health need of the population, while the supply is the been taken into consideration when planning for provision of health resources. [...] The burden thereby a possible guide to deciding about health care of illness or disease concept is based on the idea that needs more generally, it is not defined in the Act.28 health need is related to the magnitude of the health problem. [...] The World Health Organization (WHO) uses a In the absence of an explicit definition of medical burden of disease measure to gauge the size of necessity in the Act, a common implicit definition has population health problems and as an indicator of become “what physicians and hospitals do”.29 health system performance: health systems that perform well will minimise the burden of disease as efficient