Policy Brief: Key Recommendations for Effective Modalities for Urban Primary Health Care Systems in Bangladesh
The urban health system in Bangladesh is facing numerous challenges in terms of availability of healthcare services reaching the urban populations, particularly the most marginalised, including low service coverage, poor quality of services and a lack of quality monitoring. CHORUS in Bangladesh aims to explore the current use of strategic purchasing within the primary health care system in urban areas, in order to cost and evaluate possible purchasing models which could help achieve Bangladesh’s Universal Health Coverage goals and improve access, equity and efficiency of the primary health care delivery system. 
BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health and ARK Foundation have mapped the stakeholders across policy makers, urban health experts, health care providers from public and private sectors in Dhaka and Khulna metropolitan cities, and held a series of workshops to share experiences and reflect on ways to improve current modalities of the existing primary health care system.
The teams have developed a policy brief to summarise key recommendations coming out of the stakeholder workshops.
Key Recommendations
- Strategic purchasing came out as the priority for alleviating issues of high patient out of pocket expenditure
- Reforms to primary healthcare delivery in urban contexts need to accommodate the needs of informal workers and marginalised
- Regulating the private service providers and creating a well maintained supply chain will improve accountability and government ownership
Photo credit: BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health