Financial protection is a core pillar of universal health coverage (UHC) and how countries finance health directly impacts on financial protection. Inadequate financial protection mechanisms in health lead to financial hardship due to out-of-pocket health spending and create financial barriers to accessing health care.
The WHO Centre for Health Development (WKC) and the Health Financing and Economics Department at WHO Headquarters have published a technical brief, “Tracking inequalities in financial hardship due to out-of-pocket health spending by age structure of a household”.
This innovative approach of comparing data on financial protection across households with different age structures helps to shed light on the different levels of financial protection associated with the age of the person(s) seeking care, using the household as the unit of analysis. The results of this type of analysis were first published in the 2021 WHO-World Bank Global Monitoring Report on Financial Protection in Health. WHO and the World Bank collaborate to update the global database on financial protection as part of the Global Health Observatory, where one can find the indicator data broken down by the household age structure.
WKC conducts research to improve the monitoring of UHC by measuring how health systems respond to population ageing. Read more about this project here.