In a signing ceremony held at Afghanistan’s Ministry of Public Health, the Aga Khan Health Services (AKHS) took over management of health care facilities in the Bamyan and Badakhshan provinces on a pay-for-performance basis as part of the “Sehatmandi project”.
Through the Project, AKHS – with support from the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) – will manage over 1,015 health posts, 158 basic and primary health centres, 24 comprehensive health centres, five district hospitals, and two ISO-certified provincial hospitals in Faizabad and Bamyan until June 2021.
The project has the objective of increasing the utilisation and quality of health, nutrition and family planning services across 31 provinces.
Under the Sehatmandi project, the new health system will operate under a new pay-for-performance model. The Agency’s success will be measured on the number of antenatal and postnatal care visits, institutional deliveries, family planning, growth monitoring and nutrition counseling for children under the age of 24 months, health consultations for children under the age of five, the number of immunized infants, the number of women of reproductive age who are immunized against tetanus, the number of tuberculosis cases that are successfully treated, and the quantity, as well as quality, of caesarean sections and major surgeries.
The Sehatmandi project was launched in 2018 in recognition that while significant advances had been made to improve access and the quality of health care in Afghanistan since 2002, progress had been uneven. The World Bank – in partnership with the Afghanistan Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the European Union – launched the programme of performance-based contracts (also known as a pay-for-performance model). The Sehatmandi project holds service providers accountable for delivering improvements based on established targets.
Original source: AKHS
Published on 17 February 2019
