A Preliminary Assessment of Sri Lanka’s Health Sector and Steps Forward

This is a preliminary report assessing the current status of Sri Lanka’s health care system, its problems,future challenges, and issues to consider in the development of potential reform options. It provides anoverview of the status of health system in the areas of organization, financing, performance in terms ofmeeting health status objectives, equity and efficiency, and the interface with the private sector. The healthsystem is assessed in terms of both public and private components, but the description of the public sector isnecessarily more detailed, since information on the private sector is weak, and since the public sectorremains the dominant actor in the health system. The data and evidence presented is largely secondaryowing to time and budgetary constraints, but some new data from a private hospital survey, carried outspecially for this report, are used.