Facility-Based Service Readiness Assessment in Four Northern Provinces of the Lao PDR (English)

This report identifies issues and gaps in current service availability and readiness, and provides insights and recommendations on building a resilient healthcare system to achieve UHC. It discusses the findings of two assessments: a quality assessment in maternal child health areas, the RMNCAH QAISa, and the Quality Performance Scorecard (QPS), a quality assessment at health center level under the Health and Nutrition Services Access (HANSA) project. Four northern provinces, Phongsaly, Oudomxay, Huaphan, and Xieng Khuang, were selected as assessment sites because of their distinctive ethnic, cultural, and geographic characteristics, their inferiority to other regions in terms of health outcomes and nutritional status among mothers and children, and because they are the target areas of two current projects. The assessments were conducted from January 2022 to March 2023 in cooperation with the World Bank, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Korean Foundation for International Healthcare (KOFIH), at 265 healthcare facilities, including 4 provincial hospitals, 27 district hospitals, and 234 health centers.