Economics of hospitals

Edwine Barasa describes and evaluates the priority setting practices in county hospitals in Kenya.

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Edwine is the director of the Nairobi Programme of the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme and also heads the Programme’s Health Economics Research Unit (HERU). Edwine is also a Visiting Professor of Health Economics at the University of Oxford. He has a PhD in health economics (University of Cape Town), a masters degree in health economics (University of Cape Town), and a bachelors degree in Pharmacy (University of Nairobi).

Edwine’s research interests include health financing; equity and efficiency analysis in healthcare; economic evaluation of healthcare interventions; measuring health systems' performance; and health system governance.

Edwine has several years of experience of practice, advisory, and conducting health economics and financing research in Kenya and in the broader Sub-Saharan African region. He provides health financing advisory to the Kenya Ministry of Health with his latest roles including appointments by the Minister of Health to the taskforce for the reform of the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) and Kenya Health Benefits Advisory Panel. He also provides health financing technical advisory support to several international development organizations, including the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), focusing on the broader Sub-Saharan African region including Kenya, Ghana, Somalia, Malawi, Madagascar, Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan, South Sudan, Mozambique, and Egypt. His latest regional appointments include as a member of the advisory board of the Africa CDC’s Health Economic Unit, and a member of the Africa Universal Health Coverage Commission hosted by the Africa Health Agenda International Conference.