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The Role of the Private Sector in Health

In 2009, the International Health Economics Association (iHEA) held a Congress in Beijing. This report summarizes the proceedings of the pre-congress symposium on the role of the private sector in health sponsored by the USAID-funded PSP-One Partnership Project and the Rockefeller Foundation. The goal of the symposium was to foster the increasingly important dialogue between researchers interested in the private sector and health policy makers. The symposium served as one event of a series with the long-term goal of promoting greater research interest and knowledge generation around the private sector to benefit health systems development. Themes included:

• Shifting the focus from a debate of pro-public or pro-private health care delivery to health outcomes and how we can use both the private and public sectors to achieve desired results.
• Recognizing the need to collaborate with the private sector to combat communicable diseases, particularly in the fight against HIV/AIDS
• Engaging the private sector through contracting services.
• Increasing access to health care through voucher programs.
• Ensuring quality of care in the private sector.

To review presenters' abstracts download the full report.