Abstract
The health care system in Burkina Faso has long been affected by health human resources shortages, uneven geographical distribution of health care workers, and poor sourcing of generic essential drugs. Compounding this situation are the two recent crises linked to the strike by health workers' labour union, SYNTSHA, seeking salary hikes and increased allowances, and the still ongoing law suit filed by members of the governing body of the Purchase Center for Generic Essential Drugs and Medical Consumables (CAMEG) against the Minister of Health. These two recent shocks, by increasing the shortages in health care workers and generic essential medicines within health care facilities all over the country, are raising important questions with regard to the stability of the health care system in Burkina Faso, and its readiness to meet the health care needs of the population. Therefore using data from the pilot project Community Monitoring for Better Health and Education Services Delivery Project in Burkina Faso, this paper models the joint impact of generic essential drugs supply shortage and nursing staff supply shortage on access to needed health care in Burkina Faso. The results suggest that statistical endogeneity of supply side constraints are present in the standard univariate probit specification of Access to Care. However, when accounted for, the resulting Trivariate Probit model shows that although shortages of generic essential drugs supply do not constitute a significant barrier to access, shortages in nursing staff supply however are significantly constraining access to needed health care in Burkina faso. A potential explanation being that overall the health care needs in those regions are more linked to primary health services consumption from nurses, and less linked to health goods such as Generic essential drugs consumption. As such, government officials should ensure that the right policies are implemented to allow for a better regional distribution of nurses, and more importantly that they are offered better working conditions so as to avoid strikes.
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