Resource Type: Brief
Authors: USAID’s Health Finance and Governance (HFG) and Applying Science to Improve Systems (ASSIST) projects, with the Joint Learning Network (JLN)
Published: December 18, 2015

Resource Description: In a survey of over 100 government officials from nine Joint Learning Network (JLN) member countries, the need to improve the quality of health care emerged as the number one priority. In subsequent collaborative work, JLN countries identified the challenge of setting institutional roles and responsibilities to govern national health care quality delivery as a key bottleneck for quality improvement. This activity will respond to countries’ expressed need for guidance, and international attention to the issue of ensuring quality considerations are interwoven into UHC approaches. By reviewing and documenting global experiences in institutional relationships for governing quality in the health sector and providing guidance on success factors in structuring institutional roles, responsibilities, and relationships, the USAID funded Health Finance and Governance (HFG) and the Applying Science to Improve Systems (ASSIST) projects, along with partner organizations, the JLN, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), and the World Health Organization (WHO) hope to provide practical tools to be used by country practitioners to improve governance to enable, foster, and ensure quality health services.

The objective of the activity is to assess and document global experiences in institutional relationships that govern quality health services as well as provide practical and action-oriented guidance to countries on success factors in structuring institutional roles, responsibilities, and relationships. Countries seeking to develop new governance structures or to improve existing structures would have a resource, based on the results of documented country experiences, to successful approaches and lessons learned in structuring institutional roles, responsibilities, and relationships to enable, foster, and ensure ongoing quality.