PharmAccess has been awarded a research grant to the tune of the €1.07million by the Netherlands Organization for the Scientific Research (NWO-WOTRO) to carry out much needed research into communities’ perceptions and their practices around accessing health care. WOTRO is the division within NWO which supports scientific research on development issues, in particular poverty alleviation and sustainable development.

Titled Towards a client oriented health insurance system in Ghana, this research will be conducted in Ghana over the next four years where the commissioned National Health Insurance Authority is busy with the implementation of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). The Ghanaian government introduced national health insurance six years ago and now has a 65% enrolment success rate, however there has been little focus on the relationship between the technical standards applied by the provider and to what extent these standards matter to the client.  To ensure the success and sustainability of the scheme and to attain 100 percent enrolment, it’s important that all players in the chain understand the other’s expectations.

This research will provide insight into the perception of the users of health care services in Ghana, such as their medical needs, availability and affordability of medical care and health insurance products and their thoughts and experiences on the quality of the offered medical care (providers) and administrative services (insurance). This will be done through four interrelated subprojects from socio anthropological, public health, biomedical and business perspectives.

These findings will be placed in the context of existing actuarial data of NHIS and data from the health care service providers, as collected through the PharmAccess-supported accreditation system of the NHIS. Data will be collected from 32 public and private health care providers in two rural and two urban districts in Ghana

This is a unique study because of its client based focus. The findings will not only be of use to the Ghana health insurance system that will use the results to improve the scheme, but will also be of interest to other countries wishing to create similar systems. 

PharmAccess and Centre for Poverty-related Communicable Diseases, have written the proposal in collaboration with the Amsterdam Academic Medical Centre (AMC), University of Amsterdam, the University of Groningen the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research/University of Ghana and the University of Ghana Business School.