Financing options for the provision of assistive products

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ABSTRACT

Having predictable, stable and adequate financial resources is essential for achieving universal coverage of essential health products and services, including assistive products. Access to such resources would enable governments and participating organizations to initiate and maintain a system for providing assistive products and associated services, as well as to grow the scope and scale of their operations over time. While limited funding is not the only reason to explain the shortfall in the provision of assistive products globally, unpredictable and inadequate public funding has been cited as the primary cause of poor access to these products in many countries. Several financing options have been presented in this paper that could be considered by decision-makers to initiate or supplement the financing of assistive products.

KEYWORDS:

• knowledge translation
• policy and legislation
• service delivery

Acknowledgments

Johan Borg provided comments on an early draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Disclaimers

Kiu Tay-Teo and Matthew Jowett are WHO employees. The conclusions in this manuscript are theirs as individuals and do not represent WHO policy.

Notes

¹ Josephine Bundoc (Philippines), Nazmul Bari (Bangladesh), Silvana Contepomi (Argentina), Brian Donnelly (United Kingdom), Brian Everton (Canada), Takenobu Inoue (Japan), Jytte Jepsen (Norway), Ed Mylles (United Kingdom), Peter Ngomwa (Malawi), Jacqueline Ramke (New Zealand), Elsje Scheffler (South Africa), Keren Worsley (United Kingdom).

² From a health financing policy perspective, public sources include those which are compulsory and pre-paid, whilst voluntary sources are considered private (Jowett & Kutzin, 2012).

³ When applied to the foreign exchange market, it is known as a “Tobin tax” eponymously named after the Nobel Laureate Economist James Tobin.

⁴ Also referred to in the literature as “Pay for Success Financing”, “Pay for Success Bond”, “Social Benefit Bond” and “Social Bond”.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by funding from The United States Agency for International Development (USAID).