The WHO Centre for Health Development (WHO Kobe Centre – WKC) is building a portfolio of research on measuring unmet needs for health and social care among older people to assess who is being left behind in the progress towards universal health coverage (UHC).
On 10-11 June 2024, WKC convened regional WHO focal people and external academics in the emerging field of understanding unmet care needs of older people. Studies have shown that when people do not get the care they need, it is often due to cost or lack of financial protection. This is an area where expertise and interests on ageing and financial protection intersect with measurement and health information systems, which is relevant to monitoring UHC.
“Unmet needs can range from someone being unaware of their needs for care and not getting the care, to someone being aware of their needs but not getting any care, or receiving suboptimal care,” said Dr Megumi Rosenberg, WKC’s technical officer who convened the meeting.
“Measuring unmet needs to quantify the extent of the problem is particularly important. However, there is no single method that is applied universally, definitions vary, and measurement is not standardized. This limits comparability between and within countries.” she said.
Despite this, the meeting found that the available data could still offer important insights for countries. Information on the level of unmet need for healthcare in a population can complement and help validate current indicators used for tracking UHC, namely service coverage and financial hardship. Knowing the unmet need for healthcare and social care in older populations is important to guide health systems reforms around population ageing.
Professor Shereen Hussein of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and chair of the CARETRACK Consortium that WKC helped to establish, spoke about the Eastern Mediterranean Region and stressed the importance of data.
“To have data, you need to have buy-in of the country-level decision makers. To do that requires continued engagement and presenting evidence that when we support older people, we are supporting the whole population,” she said.
“It’s cost-effective, we are reducing the care burden which usually hits people at the peak of their labour market participation, and we’re also improving the quality of life. Automatically we’re reducing the pressure on the formal health system. We need to leverage whatever data and evidence that are there, even if it’s small-scale, and to have the opportunity to present that to discussions.”
The group proposed indicator definitions for unmet need for healthcare and unmet need for social care that can be used to guide data collection and analysis. It also identified opportunities for further research and dissemination platforms such as special journal issues and the Health Systems Global symposium in Nagasaki, Japan, in November 2024 as strategic opportunities to influence policy.
The meeting report will be shared soon.