More than Infrastructure and Equipment: Process Evaluation of the Health Facilities Enhancement Program

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The capital stock of public health facilities in the Philippines has been stagnant for decades. The number of hospitals remained the same since the mid-1990s and the ratio of hospital beds per 10,000 population has declined from 18 in the 1970s to 13 in the late 2000s. To arrest the deteriorating stock and quality of public health facilities, the Department of Health launched the Health Facilities Enhancement Program (HFEP) in 2007. This Policy Note presents the key findings of field surveys conducted by PIDS between December 2014 and April 2015 in several provinces to assess the HFEP implementation. Lack of service delivery network plan for expansion and upgrading of facilities, and non-use of commissioned contracting were some of the major problems found in the assessment. To address these problems, this Note provides some recommendations. They include, among others, formulating an overall national/regional health facilities strategic plan and organizing the health facilities to be upgraded or constructed into sets or tranches under a commissioned contracting approach.