What Pakistan healthcare system can learn from France?

Developing countries such as Pakistan are in deep need of assessing the performance of their health care systems by comparing their performance against that of other countries. Pakistan health care system was compared with France health care system as one of the best health care system in the world, based on Health Systems Performance Assessment (HSPA). We extracted the information content and potential performance measures, and indicated what can and cannot be inferred from our analysis. Based on our analysis, the top three performance gaps between Pakistan and France were human resources, service delivery, and financing. Pakistan’s government needs to rise adequate, equitable funding to provide care that is easily accessible, efficient, and equitable for all citizens. The health worker shortage situation is also untenable, and affects the nation’s health services delivery. If Pakistan’s health system is to deliver these outcomes, the system must address its poor inputs across financing, human resources, and service delivery. The sweeping changes that we suggest require management level changes in the health sector. Some of this will come from the brief level of management training that we suggested as a part of the curriculum for professional institutions, but much of it will come from transparency and involvement of all peoples in health care improvement.