ADB approves $106.9 mn for health care services in Sri Lanka

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has approved a $106.9 million (loan+grant) financing package to strengthen Sri Lanka’s secondary curative care services, improve communicable disease prevention and control, and enhance the health care sector’s governance and management capacity.

The funding for the Strengthening Integrated Health Care and Governance for Universal Health Coverage Programme consists of a $100 million loan from ADB and a $6.9 million grant from the Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness, and Response Trust Fund, the ADB said in a media release on Monday.

“Sri Lanka has made impressive gains in ensuring access to and quality of health services for all,” said ADB Country Director for Sri Lanka Takafumi Kadono. “But with rising longevity and changing lifestyles, elderly health care needs and non-communicable diseases are on the rise. Such demographic and disease pattern changes require a more robust secondary care to effectively provide patient-centred treatments and care services with enhanced case management capacity.”

This Results Based Lending programme will enhance the quality, capacity, and efficiency of secondary care services nationwide by supporting result-oriented hospital development, while increasing the availability of integrated and patient-centred surgical and specialist treatment services in secondary hospitals. It will also help transform secondary health care into the first referral care in the patient care pathways with enhanced integration and resource sharing with primary health care facilities and non-health government services, while improving hospital infrastructure and service process in consideration of quality of care, climate resilience, gender responsiveness, and elderly friendliness. 

The programme will support improvements in Sri Lanka’s pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response capabilities through the establishment of a centre for disease control; improve the capacity and accreditation mechanism of public health laboratories; and help implement the cross-sectoral integrated disease surveillance. It will also support measures to enhance the logistical capacity and quality assurance of pharmaceuticals, digitalisation of government procurement system, and institutionalise the adoption of good government procurement practices in the health sector. This is part of ADB’s support to the government’s effort to strengthen integrity in the pharmaceutical regulatory, procurement, and supply chain.

Benefiting the entire population of Sri Lanka, these improved health systems will help healthy individuals take advantage of educational and economic opportunities, thereby contributing to overall societal development.