PGI organizing first training workshop on costing of health care services

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The School of Public Health, Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) Chandigarh is organizing the 1st National workshop on costing of health care services from May 16th-19th, 2018 in collaboration with Department of Health Research, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India at Hotel Mount View Chandigarh.

Dr. Shankar Prinja, Additional Professor of Health Economics at School of Public Health, PGIMER and course coordinator of this training workshop, informed that the deliberations on important aspects like typology of health care costs, methodology for undertaking health system costing, methods of data collection and cost analysis will be held. The purpose of this workshop is to sensitize the policy makers, program managers, academicians and researchers on how to do costing of health care services from health system perspective. There will be facilitators from PGIMER for facilitating the participants during practical exercise and field visit. A total of thirty senior researchers and academicians from leading organizations and medical colleges of the country such as Department of Health and Research (DHR), New Delhi; TISS Mumbai, MCC Madras; KGMU, Lucknow; SMIMER, Gujarat; SMS Medical college, Jaipur; VSSMC (Burla), Odisha; Seth GSMC and KEM Hospital, Mumbai are part of this workshop.

The workshop holds significant importance in view of the Government of India’s recently announced National Health Protection Scheme, which would require adequate information on cost of various treatments/procedures for making informed choices and determining the package rates for the same. Currently, there is a paucity of evidence on cost of care especially for public sector. The evidence generated on cost of healthcare services will have multiple potential uses like for undertaking health technology assessment studies, efficiency assessment, scale up of healthcare services and designing benefit package for universal health coverage etc.