Importance Of Health Care In Bangladesh

The country of Bangladesh is located in South Asia, as part of the Indian subcontinent. The country is broken up into eight divisions/states and within these divisions, there are 64 districts, 489 upazilas (sub-districts), and 4554 unions. With a population of nearly 163 million people, it ranks as the eighth most populated country in the world and is one of the most densely populated, as well. Two-thirds of Bengalis live in rural areas, and the median age is 26 years. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the life expectancy is 70 years, the under-five mortality rate is 41 per 1000 live births, the literacy rate among adults is 57.7%, and the crude death rate is 5.7 per 1000 people. As one of the poorest developing nations in the …show more content…
Within Bangladesh’s parliamentary democracy, it’s healthcare system is made up of the government (public sector), the private sector, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and donor agencies (wpro.who.int). Bangladesh spends $2.3 billion on healthcare annually (64% comes from out-of-pocket payments) and total health expenditures are an estimated 3.0% of GDP (wpro.who.int, data.worldbank.org), where as 30% of the expenditures come from the public sector. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), which has an indirect control over the private sector, is in charge of creating national public health policy and is responsible for the provision of comprehensive public health services and care, including finances, health promotion, preventative services and employment in the health sector (dghs.gov.bd, wpro.who.int). Nine executing authorities under the MoHFW, two of its main branches being the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) and the Directorate General of Family Planning (DGFP), are in charge of implementing the policies of the Ministry, improving and creating health programs, and operating healthcare delivery systems on the national, divisional, district, upazila, union, and ward/village levels based on the population at the different levels. There are also five regulatory bodies under the MoHFW …show more content…
Both the NGOs and private health sector “have established a network of facilities to provide health and family planning services” (wpro.who.int). The private sector, basically unregulated, consists of formal and informal divisions, in which the formal division consists of hospitals, clinics, laboratories, and drug stores in urban areas; while the informal division consists of “untrained providers” of both western and traditional medicine in rural areas (wpro.who.int). On the other hand, both international and national NGO health providers in Bangladesh, which make up about 10% of total health expenditure, have benefited from donors and partnerships with the government