Nowadays the issue of public health goes beyond the boundaries of the certain countries. We live in a highly globalized world and can effectively join our efforts in order to overcome mass diseases in the poorest countries. The issue of cost-effectiveness becomes one of the central points on the agenda of the global medical organizations and institutions.
The aim of this essay is to characterize the criteria of cost-effectiveness and its impact on the global health programs and interventions.
The finding of the cost-effective solution boils down to the determination of the interventions creating the greatest good for the greatest amount of people at the lowest cost (Jacobsen, 2009). It is unarguable fact that the access to the healthcare in the poorest countries is restricted by the severe economic distress in these countries.
That is why the balance of cost and benefits should be found in the global health programs. The overcome of the mass diseases in the certain regions of our planet cannot be achieved without healthcare cost reduction. Jacobsen (2009) states that “one way to calculate cost-effectiveness is to compare the cost of an intervention with the resulting increase in years of healthy life” (p. 286).
A lot of global medical organizations and institutions refer to the measure of DALY which is the disability-adjusted life years. Levine (2007) mentions that the success of the recent programs has been proved by the inventions that used “a cost-effective approach, determined by a threshold of about $100 per DALY (disability-adjusted life years) saved” (p.25).
However, the global medical programs and interventions differ depending on their particular purpose. The vertical programs which are disease specific and centrally managed assume the delivery of medicines and services outside the ordinary medical servicing (Levine, 2007). These programs have proved their effectiveness in the low-income countries.
The community-wide interventions including salt iodation and the improvement in the tobacco control in Poland refer to the traditional public health interventions which have proved to be successful (Levine, 2007). All of these programs were developed for the achievement of the specific purpose, thus concentrating resources on the aid to certain groups and maximizing the effective result in these groups.
Technological innovations are widely claimed to be the main drivers in the healthcare access promotion. Many of the global health programs concentrate their efforts on the technological innovations in the healthcare system. However, the cost of their implementation and usage is hardly to be affordable to the low-income countries.
Levine (2007) states that “the technological innovation led to better health only because of a concerted and large-scale effort to make it available at cost affordable to developing countries and donor agencies” (p. 29). The cooperation of the private and public sectors are necessary to achieve the cost-effectiveness of the new medical technologies (Levine, 2007).
In order to summarize all above mentioned, it should be said that the criterion of cost-effectiveness is the important measure of the overall success of the health program. The reduction of cost for maximizing the number of people treated is one of the main goals of the global health interventions in the low-income countries.
In this context, finding of the cost-effective solution is vital for saving lives and increasing the life expectancy in the developing world. The global health organizations should employ this criterion for the determination of the overall effectiveness of the initiated program.
References
Jacobson, K. H. (2009). Introduction to global health. Boston, USA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers.
Levine, R. (2007). Case studies in global health millions saved. Boston, USA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers.