Absence of systematic information on the private health sector impedes governments’ ability to leverage them in the country’s health system, in a planned manner. Therefore, detailed assessment of country’s private health sector is a necessary condition for private sector engagement or public-private partnership.

Three critical approaches have been identified to strengthen the potential contribution of the private sector to public health:

• Conducting country-wide private health sector assessments;
• Strengthening legal and regulatory frameworks for the private health sector; and
• Engaging the private sector in public-private partnerships.

Careful review of the role of the private sector in health systems is being conducted with a focus on the following questions.

Detailed information in terms of the private health sector ownership pattern, resources deployed (beds, equipment, human resources), geographical location, range of services provided, quality standards, regulatory compliance, etc. have also been compiled.

In our assessment project, several challenges emerged due to the fact that the private health sector providers are not homogenous. They range from faith-healers at one end of the spectrum to specialty corporate hospitals at the other. They can be categorized according to motives and objectives (for-profit or not-for-profit entities, popularly called nongovernmental organizations); scale (individual clinics to multi-specialty hospitals); level of care (primary care services to tertiary care services); system (allopathic system to indigenous system); source of funding (user-fee to donations and grants); geographical spread; regulatory compliance, etc.