The assignment aimed to help the Ministry of Health (MoH) strengthen the capacities of the primary health care system in Montenegro to enable equitable (including gender equity and disadvantaged populations) access to health protection for all children in Montenegro.
The CGC team accomplished the following objectives set by the UNICEF country office in Montenegro:
- Analyze the human resource availability to identify current and estimate future gaps (based on trends) in meeting existing standards and norms (workforce ratios at the population level and doctor to the patient), taking into account the workload and caseload of pediatric teams in PHC by types of care (like the number and duration of contacts)
- Develop a model of PHC services (workforce profiles, ratios and salary coefficients) for children based on the above findings as well as consultations with MoH, Institute for Public Health of Montenegro (IPH) and stakeholders (including PHC staff, professional associations, and parents, UNICEF, WHO
- Design a dynamic modeling tool for costing the PHC services and measuring the gap between existing capacities, current norms and standards and the proposed model.
- Review the health system’s budget, specifically on PHC services, to understand trends and the current level of public spending on children to contextualize the above analysis.
Develop an investment case for increased allocations to PHC services from the state budget.