Health services: a review and remedial strategies

This paper analyses the difficulties faced by Papua New Guinea's health care system in the past 10 years, and proposes a package of reforms and policy initiatives. The approach taken contrasts current health delivery arrangements with the system operating in the late 1970s, arguing that recovery and advance in the health sector will require significant expenditure reallocations; new efforts to foster decentralisation; the conversion of the National Department of Health into an agency that negotiates global budget transfers to provinces and monitors performance; a new partnership with church-run health services; and the elimination of entry barriers and adoption of proactive measures to foster private provision of health service