Uganda National Association of Private Hospitals (UNAPH)

Private Hospitals for the Public Good Introduction Uganda National Association of Private Hospitals (UNAPH) is undertaking initiatives to positively re-position the private hospital sector in relation to stakeholder and public awareness. Health is both a public good and to a considerable extent a private good. Purchasers of health benefit directly from what they pay for, making it a private good. Health care is treated as a public good because it is not an ordinary commodity that works efficiently in a free market. For economists, a public good is not simply something that is “good for the public”; it is something that benefits many people, including those who do not pay for it. When someone is sick they are not necessarily worried about price, the price they are willing to pay may become near limitless because the alternate could be death. Healthcare in terms of supply and demand does not fit efficiently into a free market and externalities provided by healthy citize...

Private Hospitals Referral Management Guidelines Introduction Referral is a process by which a health worker/facility transfers the responsibility of care to another health worker/facility or social worker. Referral can be vertical, horizontal or diagonal to Public, private, community based, traditional and alternative medicine practitioners. The health care system is divided into three main levels of health care delivery namely primary, secondary, and tertiary. With regard to referral services, currently patients are referred from primary to secondary and tertiary levels. However, the current referral system is not functioning properly due to the absence of a referral policy to guide the referral of patients from one level to another. Therefore there was a need to develop a referral policy that will guide the referral of patients between the different levels of health care provision in an effective, efficiency and systematic way. There are major problems that are nega...