Rationale

Target 3.8 is defined as “Achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all”. The concern is with all people and communities receiving the quality health services they need (including medicines and other health products), without financial hardship. Two indicators have been chosen to monitor target 3.8 within the SDG framework. Indicator 3.8.1 is for health service coverage and indicator 3.8.2 focuses on health expenditures in relation to a household’s budget to identify financial hardship caused by direct health care payments. Taken together, indicators 3.8.1 and 3.8.2 are meant to capture the service coverage and financial protection dimensions, respectively, of target 3.8. These two indicators should be always monitored jointly.

Definition

Coverage of essential health services (defined as the average coverage of essential services based on tracer interventions that include reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health, infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases and service capacity and access, among the general and the most disadvantaged population).

The indicator is an index reported on a unitless scale of 0 to 100, which is computed as the geometric mean of 14 tracer indicators of health service coverage.

The tracer indicators are as follows, organized by four subindices of service coverage:

1. Reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health

2. Infectious diseases

3. Noncommunicable diseases

4. Service capacity and access

Method of measurement

For each country, the most recent value for each tracer indicators is taken from WHO or other international agencies

Method of estimation

The index uses a weighted geometric mean (where the weight is the denominator population of the indicator) within each of the four health subindices, and then a geometric mean is calculated from those four values.