The objective of this framework is to identify areas of political action to modify health systems and improve their performance. These six basic components must be strong to achieve the general objectives of a health system, which were to improve health, responsiveness (that is, how the system responds to changing health needs or other changes in the system), protection against social and financial risks, and greater efficiency. Under this framework (see the image “the WHO system framework” below), six basic components constitute a health system or, in other words, there are six essential functions of the health system. Under this framework, the objectives of the health system are to improve health status, customer satisfaction and risk protection (quite similar to the WHO framework), and the intermediate objectives are access, quality and efficiency.
Roberts et al. (200) published a framework for evaluating the performance of health systems and guiding efforts to strengthen health systems. This approach was jointly developed by the World Bank Institute (WBI) and the Harvard University School of Public Health and is taught in the Flagship Program on Health Sector Reform and Sustainable Financing led by the BMI. The basic components framework, while widely used, was also criticized for not recognizing how the basic components were interconnected and interacting with each other; and for ignoring consumers and communities at the center of the health system.
