Health Service Provision in Ghana: Assessing Facility Capacity and Costs of Care

This report draws from the Access, Bottlenecks, Costs, and Equity (ABCE) project in Ghana, a multipronged and multicountry research collaboration focused on understanding what drives and hinders health service provision. Results include the following:

• Assessing the capacity of health facilities to provide services across different levels of care, focusing on factors such as human resources for health and availability of essential medicines
• Tracking trends in facility spending and funding sources, with a special focus on the expansion of Ghana’s National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS)
• Examining trends in patient volumes across facility types
• Quantifying the relationship between facility resources and production of services
• Estimating facility costs associated with different types of services

This report represents the work of many field team members and researchers at IHME, the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Ghana’s Ministry of Health, the Ghana UNICEF office, and UNICEF. Several individuals helped lead the ABCE project in Ghana, including Kwakye Kontor of Ghana’s MOH; Evelyn Ansah, Ivy Osei, and Bertha Garshong at GHS; and Anirban Chatterjee and Jane Mwangi from UNICEF. Funding for this project was provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – Disease Control Priorities Network (Investment # OPP51229).