Mapping private-public-partnership in health organizations: India experience

The dream of universal health care demands a much larger and wider approach, engaging not just the public but also the private sector. This paper has attempted mapping the present public-private partnership scenario in India using the WHO health system functions framework, giving an insight into the nature and extent of challenge of the present dominant model. A systematic review methodology was adopted to identify published literature on private-public partnership in India. From an initial pool of 785 articles were identified. Finally a total of 29 published articles meeting the inclusion criteria were included. The descriptive framework of Health system functions by WHO (2000), were used to analyze the data. All papers which were considered for the study were segregated based on the 4 prime health system functions: Financing; Management of non-financial inputs; Health service delivery and Oversight. The literature review reveals that more than half of the papers (51.72%) selected for the study were focused on health service delivery functions and quite thin literature were available for other 3 functions, which includes financing, management of non-financial inputs and oversight functions as per WHO. This finding raise an important question if the genesis of most of the public-private partnerships is out of the inability of the public sector in reaching out to a particular target group by virtue of its geographical position or difficulty in working with high risk groups. Considering the limitations of the present model of engagement of private and public sectors, it demands for an alternative model of engagement where the mutual strength that exists with each one of the partners, could be harnessed and complemented. An alternate model is to engage in tri-partite partnership (TPP) between the government, non-government and the corporates.