World Health Organization Maldives and the Asia Pacific Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (APO) wrapped up a two-day mission to initiate the Maldives Health System Review (Health in Transition - HiT). The WHO-supported review for Ministry of Health was facilitated by an international team of experts representing the International Health Policy Program (IHPP, Bangkok, Thailand), Nossal Institute for Global Health (Austalia) and Asia Pacific Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (New Delhi, India). Senior officials of Ministry of Health and it’s different departments actively engaged and provided their inputs during the visit.
Health System in Transition (HiT) review will provide a detailed description of a country’s health system, and policy and reform developments. It is conducted based on the findings from secondary data sources within health sector. It assesses the health system’s core components such as organization and governance, financing, physical and human resources, service provision, and health reforms. This was of utmost importance as a comprehensive review of the Maldives health system does not exist.
During the mission, a one day workshop was held for Ministry of Health departments by the international experts to establish and identify the writing team for Maldives HiT (including the team leader and author of each chapter), discuss the HiT template in detail, identify data sources and potential challenges, clarify and answer any queries, assist the national team of authors to develop a timeline for the production of the HiT
Each HiT highlights challenges and areas requiring in-depth analysis and provides a tool for the dissemination of information on health systems. As a result of the two-day mission in Maldives, chapter authors were identified for the Maldives HIT publication.
Health sector development in any country is a dynamic and rapidly evolving process. In-between the complete renewals of a HiT in Member States, WHO will ensure continued collaboration with the APO to establish a mechanism to update sections of the published HiTs in order to capture significant changes in the interim.