Cost of delivering secondary-level health care services through public sector district hospitals in India

BACKGROUND and to generalize the findings for Indian set-up. RESULTS: The overall annual cost of delivering secondary-level health care services through a public sector district hospital in north India was ' 11,44,13,282 US Dollars (USD) 2,103,185. Human resources accounted for 53 per cent of the overall cost. The unit cost of an inpatient bed-day, surgical procedure and outpatient consultation was ' 844 (USD 15.5), ' 3481 (USD 64) and ' 170 (USD 3.1), respectively. With the current set of resource allocation, per-capita cost of providing health care through district hospitals in north India was ' 139 (USD 2.5). INTERPRETATION & CONCLUSIONS: The estimates obtained in our study can be used for Fiscal planning of scaling up secondary-level health services. Further, these may be particularly useful for future research such as benefit-incidence analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis and national health accounts including disease-specific accounts in India.