The study involved an assessment of the experiences of regulatory agencies, regulated institutions and service users. The scope was defined as an assessment of aforementioned experiences in Nigeria with the regulation of healthcare providers or facilities to assure service quality and protect public safety, in order to derive lessons and implications for future policy development, programming, and research. The assessment of the regulatory agencies in the health sector used the information generated from the field and the desk review to identify the key internal and external factors that are important to achieving the objectives of the regulatory agencies. It also addressed the following questions – What do the regulatory agencies do well? What may prevent goals and objectives from being achieved? What opportunities are available to improve efficiency and effectiveness? What are the conditions that could damage the regulatory agencies performance?
Within the broad framework, the regulated institutions and individuals involved were – medical and health facilities, pharmacy and chemist shops, physicians, doctors, dentists, optometrists, nurses, radiographers. The assessment was conducted on the perspectives of the regulated institutions and individuals on the structure and operational effectiveness of the regulatory agencies. To this end the following issues were examined: Regulatory Governance Structure, Independence of Regulatory Agencies, Transparency and Accountability, Internal Capacity and competencies, Oversight Function, Enforcement, Sanctions, Appeal Process, Inter-relationships, Impact and Compliance.
The target groups – organizations, groups, or individuals – that the regulatory activity is intended to reach and influencereferred to as service users were also covered in the analysis. These are consumers of pharmaceutical products and other medical and health care services. The study assessed the impact of the regulatory activities on the welfare of these groups.
Since the goal of the assessment is to provide recommendations that will improve the system, the study focused on those elements of the regulatory system that, if changed, would clearly lead to better sector outcomes. It looked at the weaknesses in governance, efficacy of regulation and systematically evaluated the substantive institutional characteristics – resources, structure, communication, consultation, consistency – of the entire health regulatory system.
Prepared by Centre For Health Economics And Development for Office of Chief Economic Adviser to the President, Nigeria. Contact us for full report @ info@checod.org