National health accounts are a key practical tool for policy-makers interested in evaluating and restructuring their nation's health care financing and assessing financial interventions to improve people's health. This publication provides guidance in developing socioeconomic information to help establish a framework for national health accounts, including defining health expenditure, acquiring and evaluating data, non-survey data sources, using surveys, estimation procedures and financing agents.

This report summarize the experience since 2008 of the global efforts coordinated by the World Bank to use National Health Accounts (NHA) to better assess sources and allocation of public, donor and private health expenditures and inform countries' health financing policies.

This handbook compiles methods for gathering, organizing and disseminating data to inform policy and manage health systems worldwide. Contributing authors describe national and international structures for generating data and explain the relevance of ethics, policy, epidemiology, health economics, demography, statistics, geography and qualitative methods to describing population health. The reader, whether a student of global health, public health practitioner, programme manager, data analyst or policymaker, will appreciate the methods, context and importance of collecting and using global health data.

This report assesses how Kazakhstan measures up in the development and application of its national health accounts, delivering a set of recommendations to improve the health spending information necessary to support health system performance.

What are public health services? Countries across Europe understand what they are or what they should include differently. This study describes the experiences of nine countries detailing the ways they have opted to organize and finance public health services and train and employ their public health workforce. It covers England France Germany Italy the Netherlands Slovenia Sweden Poland and the Republic of Moldova and aims to give insights into current practice that will support decision-makers in their efforts to strengthen public health capacities and services. Each country chapter captures the historical background of public health services and the context in which they operate; sets out the main organizational structures; assesses the sources of public health financing and how it is allocated; explains the training and employment of the public health workforce; and analyses existing frameworks for quality and performance assessment. The study reveals a wide range of experience and variation across Europe and clearly illustrates two fundamentally different approaches to public health services: integration with curative health services (as in Slovenia or Sweden) or organization and provision through a separate parallel structure (Republic of Moldova). The case studies explore the context that explain this divergence and its implications. This study is the result of close collaboration between the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies and the WHO Regional Office for Europe Division of Health Systems and Public Health. It accompanies two other Observatory publications Organization and financing of public health services in Europe and The role of public health organizations in addressing public health problems in Europe: the case of obesity alcohol and antimicrobial resistance (both forthcoming).

This overview of health financing tools, policies and trends--with a particular focus on challenges facing developing countries--provides the basis for effective policy-making. Analyzing the current global environment, the book discusses health financing goals in the context of both the underlying health, demographic, social, economic, political and demographic analytics as well as the institutional realities faced by developing countries, and assesses policy options in the context of global evidence, the international aid architecture, cross-sectoral interactions, and countries' macroeconomic frameworks and overall development plans.

The RAND Corporation conducted interviews, consulted with experts, and carried out detailed analyses of existing tracking systems that focus on health resources flowing to and within developing countries, the objective being to determine how to provide a truly global health resource tracking system that will provide comprehensive, accurate, up-to-date data for policymakers and other users and will address the current systems' limitations.