ArmInfo. Armenian office of Oxfam presented the evaluation report in respect to the Project on Outpatient Public Health Care in Armenia As Margarita Hakobyan, the Director of OXFAM Armenian resident office, shared during her speech delivered at the event opening, the three year duration project on evaluation of the budget based project, which will end in December o9f this year, is implemented by the OXFAM office and Center on Economic development and Research within the financial support of European Union. She also informed, that the budget dimensions evaluation embraces three aspects: social security, agriculture and health care.
"We have already completed the monitoring and evaluation of two budget based projects in the sector of social security, and by the end of December we plan to finalize also two projects in the sectors of agriculture. Today we present the evaluation report in respect to one of two projects in the field of health care," Hakobyan stated. She added, that in 2016, within the purpose of implementation of the project on on Outpatient Public Health Care, AMD 11.2 bln funds were allocated, which forms about 12.7% of all the health care sector budget of the country, i.e. proceeding of AMD 3763 per person.
Following Hakobyan's wording, the monitoring showed that an urgent need occurred to reformate the state policy in the field of outpatient treatment services. Following the expert, to improve the efficiency of the project, it is necessary to expand the range of nationals involved, to correct the destination of the project, as well as to strengthen the quality of the physician doctors' skills, services supplied and drugs provided. "During this monitoring we obtained very interesting results. For instance, in the case of illness only 20% of population apply to polyclinics - mainly the middle class and low middle, which is 78.5%. Poor and rich people do not apply to polyclinics, which is caused by low awareness and lack of trust to the services provided. In general, there are children under 7 years old and retired people that apply for treatment to polyclinics," Hakobyan told. The preference right to get low costed and free of charge drugs is rendered just to 17% of people, forming one single group.
The expert mentioned also, that 4% of house maids have never applied for outpatient treatment, and 7,5% apply very seldom. At the same time 6,5% of house maids stated that in the case of illness they apply directly to stationary clinics, the same they do in respect to their children in 4,7 % of cases. The patients of 46-60 age range apply for the stationary treatment most often, forming 23%. And older people, which are 23.4%, apply to polyclinics. Men applying for stationary treatment are 43,7%, and to polyclinics - just 39,3%. Disabled patients apply to polyclinics in 32,9% of cases - this is 70,6 % of the total number of people, comprising this group. And the poor people's polyclinics attendance forms only 32 % In his turn, Sergey Khachatryan, the Deputy Health Minister of Armenia, stated, that yet from 90-ies of the last century, when a transition to the new economic reality took place, a number of problems in this field occurred. According his wording, Armenia essentially derives from other countries, including neighbor ones, due to a developed infrastructure in this aspect. "Although, despite the availability of developed infrastructure, we have a number of problems in this field," Khachatryan said. At the same time he stated the willingness to work on cancellation of all the gaps existing in this sector.
To note, OXFAM is an International Charity Foundation, which was founded in Oxford (Great Britain) in 1942. The Oxfam embraces more than 70 countries. In Armenia the project was launched in 1993, supporting Armenian Government to implement the priorities of national development. The Economic and Development Research Center (EDRC) is an independent research foundation, which was established in 2001 in Yerevan, to implement independent research in the field of social development.