Best Practices in Achieving Universal Health Coverage: A Scoping Review

The Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is a very important and effective policy in the health system of countries worldwide. Using the experiences and learning from the best practices of successful countries in the UHC can be very helpful. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to provide a scoping review of successful global interventions and practices in achieving UHC.

This is a scoping review study that has been conducted using the Arkesy and O'Malley framework. To gather information, Embase, PubMed, The Cochrane Library, Scopus, Scientific Information Database, and MagIran were searched using relevant keywords from 2000 to 2019. Studies about different reforms in health systems and case studies, which have examined successful interventions and reforms on the path to UHC, were included. Articles and abstracts presented at conferences and congresses were excluded. Framework Analysis was also used to analyze the data.

Out of 4257 articles, 57 finally included in the study. The results showed that of the 40 countries that had successful interventions, most were Asian. The interventions were financial protection (40 interventions that were categorized into 14 items), service coverage (31 interventions categorized into 7 items), population coverage (36 interventions categorized into 9 items), and quality (18 interventions categorized into 7 items), respectively. Also, the positive results of interventions on the way to achieving UHC were financial protection (14 interventions), service coverage (7 interventions), population coverage (9 interventions), and quality (7 interventions), respectively.

This study provides a comprehensive and clear view of successful interventions in achieving the UHC. Therefore, with consideration to lessons learned from successful interventions, policymakers can design appropriate interventions for their country.