Tunisia Health Sector

The Ministry of Public Health organized on July 7^th in collaboration with the World Bank, a conference in Tunis to present the recent study on the Tunisian health sector. This study provides an analysis of the health sector performance and proposes recommendations to improve the system's performances and its financial sustainability.

Other articles (in French) Nawafid Magheb#2Article  : "Etude sur le secteur de la santé en Tunisie" Download the press release(Word) Websites Health sector in MENA region(pdf) The Tunisian Ministry of Health (in French)

July 2006 - Tunisian Health Sector has been performing relatively well in the last decades. Although the annual health expenditures are still lower than 150$US per capita, Tunisians have a rather high life expectancy – estimated at 73 years in 2004 -   a low infant mortality rate - 19 deaths per 1000 live births – and a maternal mortality rate relatively low too – 70 deaths per 100000 live births.

At the macroeconomic level, the Health system performance is satisfactory as its results are equivalent to that of countries with comparable income. However, the system performance at the microeconomic level shows that there is a margin for improving efficiency of health expenditures and quality of health services.

System equity is also satisfying.More than 80% of the Tunisian population has health coverage that allows access to medical care either through social health insurance or public medical assistance program. This percentage is particularly high for a middle-income country like Tunisia. In addition, health infrastructure and human resources are reasonably distributed throughout the country.

Still, important challenges have to be addressed in order to improve health system performance and ensure its long-term financial sustainability. The World Bank study made recommendations to:

• Improve health services quality and system efficiency.
• Improve management of non communicable diseases at the primary care level to face demographic and epidemiologic transitions.
• Gradually expand health care coverage through the social health insurance system while developing the management capacity of the health insurance fund and the financial sustainability of the system.

This study is one of the priorities of the World Bank’s Country Assistance Strategy (CAS) elaborated in 2004 that focuses on improving the quality of social services in Tunisia.