Free Health Care for pregnant women and children under six in South Africa

A year later, an evaluation of the FHC policy was prosed to assess four areas of the policy:

• the effect of the FHC on the utilization of health services (private and public)
• the monetary cost of the policy in terms of additional expenditure and loss of fee revenue
• the perceptions, attitudes, and opinions of health care users
• the perceptions, attitudes and opinions of health care providers (private and public)

The methods used to conduct this evaluation included an analysis of health service utilisation patterns, as well as an assessment of the perceptions of health service providers and users. The monetary cost of the FHC policy was assessed by calculating the additional expenditure and the reduction in fee revenue incurred by the policy.

Because this evaluation was conducted retrospectively, and within the constraints of a poor health information system, the findings of this report should be interpreted with caution. Furthermore, it was not possible to assess the effect of the FHC policy on health status or health care outcome. Some of the conclusions and recommendations have been substantiated by data from a thorough international literature review.