Reaching Universal Health Coverage by 2035: Is Cameroon on Track?

Abstract

Access to health care is a fundamental human right, which places a legal obligation on states to ensure access to quality, timely, acceptable, and affordable health care for its citizens. However, many states struggle to meet this basic right for their citizens given that every year about 100 million people are pushed into poverty, while 150 million people suffer financial catastrophe due to out of pocket payments for health. In Cameroon, studies have shown that about 64% of households cannot access healthcare, because they perceive the cost of care to be high. In 2012, the National Health Accounts (NHA) estimated that about 70% of the Total Health Expenditure (THE) for the country was borne by households. Compared to its peers, the contribution of Cameroonian households is the third highest in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the average is 34%. To remedy this situation, Cameroon has initiated reflections aimed at establishing a universal health coverage (UHC) scheme for its population. This paper therefore aimed at providing a synthesis of Cameroon's progress and assessing if the country is on track to achieving UHC by 2035.

Decrease in Hospitalizations and Increase in Deaths during the Covid-19 Epidemic in a Pediatric Hospital, Yaounde-Cameroon and Prediction for the Coming Months

“…This sector was deeply affected by the lockdown. There is no universal health insurance system in Cameroon [11]. Many faced financial difficulties and lost the means to bring their sick children to the hospital.…”

“…It unveiled the necessity for all countries to put in place a strong and efficient health system or at least a resilient one [10]. Cameroon, with its low per capita income, suffering from the lack of universal health coverage, coupled with its inefficient health system and limited access to quality care was therefore likely to have difficulties in meeting these challenges [11][12][13].…”

Strategic Health Purchasing Progress Mapping in Cameroon: A Scoping Review

“…In addition, we gathered documents based on previous research [33][34][35] and through direct knowledge of the context. Through the citation tracking exercise, we identified a well-known national scholar (NCJ) 36 who was actively involved in the development of the country health financing strategy. He served as an entry point by recommending us relevant local stakeholders to whom we were able to ask additional documents as relevant.…”

“…The following reasons for exclusion were included: 11 articles were not related to strategic health purchasing and 5 were not from Cameroon. Finally, after this second screening stage, we retained 35 articles for data extraction (Figure 1), including publications on mutual health organization (MHO) scheme, [37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50] PBF scheme, 33,34,[51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60] voucher scheme, 61 national health insurance (NHI) scheme, 36,62 private health insurance (PHI) scheme, 63 and multiple schemes [64][65][66][67][68] (Annex 1). The articles were screened using both the title and the abstract.…”

“…The implementation of the various schemes is constrained by lack of clarity in the responsibilities and roles of Government and across different ministries and purchasing agencies. In a variable scale, only the PBF 33 and the NHI schemes 36 explicitly included (or have planned to include) health purchasing and health providers autonomy in their design. However, the high centralization of the health administration gives very limited autonomy to public health purchasers to influence the achievement of both financial and health system objectives.…”