Reported by : Aviral Vatsa PhD, MBBS

Comparative Performance of Private and Public Healthcare Systems in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Systematic Review

It is widely perceived that private sector health care is more efficient, accountable and sustainable than public sector health care. Public sector health care is believed to be more equitable and evidence based. Scientists from various reputed institutes from US and UK collaborated to address the issue and investigated the comparative performance of both these systems in low and middle- income countries. Basu et al systematically studied a variety of documents including meta-analyses, case-control studies,  reports published by non-governmental agencies and international agencies. 

Interestingly the authours concluded that: 

“Studies evaluated in this systematic review do not support the claim that the private sector is usually more efficient, accountable, or medically effective than the public sector; however, the public sector appears frequently to lack timeliness and hospitality towards patients”

Although the study limits to the low- and middle- income countries but it does bring to light the requirement to focus on different limitations of both the systems. 

Ref: Basu S, Andrews J, Kishore S, Panjabi R, Stuckler D (2012) Comparative Performance of Private and Public Healthcare Systems in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Systematic Review. PLoS Med 9(6): e1001244. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001244