Resource Type: Report
Authors: Stephen Musau, Josef Tayag, and Abigail Vogus
Published: 05/2013

Resource Description:

The Government of Saint Lucia has been considering a national health financing mechanism since the early 2000s. After initial work by a task force in 2002, this mechanism has become known as the Universal Health Care (UHC) plan. The UHC plan as currently envisioned would identify sources of additional revenue for expanding health services coverage at all levels of the health system beyond the services already covered under the current Ministry of Health, Human Services, and Family Affairs’ budget. The UHC’s main goals are to increase the availability of resources for health; reduce the burden of out-of-pocket expenditures on households; and promote efficiency and equity in the use of resources for health.

After consultations with the USAID-funded Health Systems 20/20 Caribbean Project, the Ministry of Health agreed to prioritize a bottom-up normative costing to estimate the costs of service delivery. This approach was considered the most appropriate to estimate the budget required to afford any additional coverage of services in the UHC and a first step for future analyses.

The purpose of this report, Saint Lucia: Health Service Delivery Costing and Other Economic Analyses, is to provide technical advice to the Ministry of Health for conducting health service delivery costing.