The Ministry of Health signed service contracts with health providers including the KHMH yesterday. That means that those providers will be expected to provide care in line with certain verifiable targets and indicators. It may sound jargon-istic, but it's part of an initiative to change the culture of health management: making it more efficient and accountable to make sure that you get better health care. Following up on those contracts, today international facilitators were in Belize showing health managers how to run a system that relies less on intuition and more on data. Peter Allen is in charge of policy and planning at the Ministry of Health and he told us about the change.
Peter Allen, Policy and Planning Unit - Ministry of Health
"Much of the management of the health system in Belize over the last 20 twenty years, which is my personal knowledge of the health system, has been largely intuitively, even when I was a manager myself. Often you don't find you have the real evidence but you make decisions based on what you perceive around what. What we're really aiming at is to move our management system towards managing based on results. The health budget as you know is I think the second largest budget of all the line Ministries and approaching $60 million a year now or even more. We have a responsibility I think to all the Belizean people to make sure that we use that money in the most effective and efficient way to get the best possible results. And how will people know if you're getting the best possible results if we fail to measure our progress towards those results."
