Essential Benefit Package Design Post COVID-19

With COVID-19 and beyond, advancing toward universal health care will be more difficult for many countries. Local national priority setting is urgently required to provide health services with adequate financial protection to all. As resources are severely constrained in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), agreeing on decision criteria for selecting the interventions to be publicly financed in a defined essential services package is crucial. In a piece published in Nature Medicine, Stéphane Verguet and colleagues detail how packages of essential health services can be developed in LMICs, how experts and citizens can choose principles and criteria, and use various analytical methods to identify which health interventions to be provided free of charge. The paper draws on a recently completed exercise of revising Ethiopia’s national essential health services package.

Learn more: Read the full Nature Medicine article, Toward Universal Health Coverage in the Post-COVID-19 Era
Learn more: Explore the Resource Pack: Ethiopian Health Decision Sciences
Learn more: Read about Stéphane Verguet’s Disease Control Priorities-Ethiopia