Cost of corruption in healthcare, measuring its impact and strengthening anti-corruption strategies
Corruption in health systems is a significant barrier to achieving universal health coverage (UHC), leading to wasted resources, compromised quality of care, and preventable illness and death. While it is well known that corruption imposes substantial costs, effectively addressing the issue requires robust methods to measure and monitor its financial and health impacts.
This discussion document provides an overview of existing approaches to estimating the cost of corruption in healthcare, offering insights to inform anti-corruption, transparency, and accountability (ACTA) policies and interventions. It highlights promising methodologies for assessing corruption-related losses and underscores the feasibility of empirical measurement.