Assignment on What is the Meaning of Health System?

Running Head: HEALTH SYSTEMS
Health system in India and Senegal
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note

1HEALTH SYSTEMS
A country’s healthcare system is influenced by several factors such as the demographics,
economics, lifestyle, culture, values and the social determinants. Health inequities are prevalent
in many developing countries due to its strong impact on the lifestyle of the people, which
affects the healthcare systems. A person’s monetary income affects their healthcare accessibility
and the government’s policy and decision making skills plays an important part in the
development of health care systems.
The health systems of every country differs in terms of the government, the target
population, economic development and the healthcare management (World Health Organization,
2019). Countries like Australia, Canada, Kuwait, Brazil, Bahrain, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Singapore,
Spain and few other countries has a universal government funded health system. Countries like
Albania, Belgium, Iran, Japan, Czech Republic, France and United Arab Emirates has a universal
public insurance system. Algeria, Argentina, Austria, Germany, Israel, Mexico and Turkey has a
universal public-private insurance system. Countries with universal private health insurance
system include Liechtenstein, Netherlands and Switzerland, and countries like Egypt, India,
Jordan, Indonesia, United States and Ethiopia has a non-universal insurance system (Who.int,
2019).
The health care system in India is a non-universal insurance system in which a part of the
population has a private healthcare insurance, few are eligible for subsidiary public health care
and the others are not provided any healthcare insurance. In India, the state government is
responsible for the provisions of healthcare and not the central government. The primary duties
of the governing body is to raise the standard of the nutrition and living, including the
improvement of public health. The parliament of India has endorsed many policies and
legislations for the welfare of the country and one of them was National Health Policy in 1983. It

2HEALTH SYSTEMS
was updated in 2002 and then later in 2017, which mentioned the issue of increasing non-
communicable diseases, planning of strong and efficient healthcare system with a sustainable
expenditure and a rapidly growing economy to enable fiscal capacity. In 2018, a government
funded project known as Ayushman Bharat was launched for providing health insurance to the
public. The total expenditure by the government was 3.89% for healthcare in the year 2015
(Patel et al., 2017).
The healthcare system of Senegal is divided into three parts such as central, regional and
peripheral level. The central level has the ministerial office and the related branches, the regional
level is also known as the regional level because the administrative level follows the concerns
related to healthcare and the peripheral level has districts with one health center and other
smaller centers, so it is known as the health district. The national health system has regional
hospitals, district health centers and health posts. The rural areas has been provided health care
services known as health centers, health posts and health points the chronological order of
importance. The common barriers found in this healthcare system is the lack of awareness, poor
communication, decreasing number of health care workers and sociopolitical barriers that
reduces the efficiency of Senegal’s healthcare system (Nagai et al., 2017).
A healthcare system is a framework of processes that ensures financial, organizational
and efficient healthcare facilities to the population of any country, depending on the capacity of
the government.

3HEALTH SYSTEMS
References
Nagai, M., Fujita, N., Diouf, I. S., & Salla, M. (2017). Retention of qualified healthcare workers
in rural Senegal: lessons learned from a qualitative study. Rural & Remote Health, 17(3).
Patel, V., Parikh, R., Nandraj, S., Balasubramaniam, P., Narayan, K., Paul, V. K., ... & Reddy, K.
S. (2015). Assuring health coverage for all in India. The Lancet, 386(10011), 2422-2435.
Who.int. (2019). WHO | WHO Statistical Information System (WHOSIS). Retrieved 6 January
2020, from https://www.who.int/whosis/en/
World Health Organization. (2019). World Health Statistics 2019: Monitoring health for the
SDGs. Retrieved 6 January 2020, from
https://www.who.int/gho/publications/world_health_statistics/2019/en/