Healthcare tipping point

Posted on 23 April 2024

Rolling out Universal Health Care (UHC) brings benefits to poorer families, but only up to a point.

The first paper from the HFACT project that the Centre is part of has been published in The Lancet Global Health.

Led by Thomas Hone from Imperial College School of Public Health, with contributions from other HFACT partners including those at the Centre for Health Economics, the analysis of 60 lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs) showed that expanding healthcare services results in reductions in infant mortality - with the largest reductions for poorer households.

However, as coverage increases, the benefits for poorer households start to decrease with factors such as socioeconomic barriers to access, variation in healthcare quality and health insurance schemes increasingly playing a role.

The researchers say that policies should be better designed to ensure lower income groups continue to benefit as coverage expands.

Dr Thomas Hone said: “We’re seeing that richer populations are actually benefitting more than the poorest. This goes contrary to much of what is set out by the World Health Organization – where poorest populations should be targeted – and we urgently need policy change to address this.”

Read the full paper

Notes to editors:

This research was funded by the UK National Institute for Health and Care Research (grant numbers NIHR133252 and NIHR150067) using UK aid from the UK Government to support global health research.