Costs and benefits of investing in health systems

摘要

Investments in animal health surveillance, control and prevention can be separated between the core investment in health systems and investment in programmes to address specific diseases. A large proportion of the investments have been made by the public sector, particularly for the coordination of activities and the costs of developing new technologies relating to diagnostics, immunologicals, antimicrobials and soft skills relating to management, epidemiology and economics. Paradigm shifts in government roles and pressures on public sector budgets have increased the importance of economic assessment of specific disease programmes, and more recently to justify the general costs that underpin the overall health system. The World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) has supported this work with the development of the Performance of Veterinary Services (PVS) tool to identify strengths and weaknesses in core health systems and the diseases whose control is essential for economic development. The paperdiscusses an approach to assessing the costs and benefits of investment in animal health systems, including consideration of the impacts of animal disease, the weaknesses in current data sets and the need for better systems of data capture, analysis andinterpretation. It highlights three issues: (i) a failure to recognise the fixed longer term underpinning core investments required for health systems; (ii) lack of data on health impacts and presenting an outline of an 'ideal' surveillance system to address this; and (iii) lack of application of economics to decision making.