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Health

Health Care and Service Delivery

Last updated on 13 March 2008

Health service delivery refers to the way inputs such as finance, staff, treatment, equipment and drugs all deliver a range of health interventions to consumers seeking to access health care. Improving service delivery depends on having key resources that are well organised and managed.

Health services include personal health services that are preventive, diagnostic, therapeutic or rehabilitative; whilst non-personal services cover areas such as mass health education/ promotion programs, health legislation and the provision of basic sanitation facilities. In the case of clinical interventions the patient is at the centre of service delivery, whilst non-individual public health services affect the whole population. Incompetence or breakdown in the process of care-giving may be the result of problems in practice, products, procedures or systems.

A key issue facing development agencies is the utilisation of health services as they are often inaccessible or mistrusted by consumers. Lack of managerial capacity at all levels of the health system is increasingly cited as a binding constraint to scaling up services and achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Follow the links below for resources including publications, websites, guides, toolkits and research covering health care and service delivery issues.