For patients and carers, questions comprised the following themes (1) a description of the experience of their care; (2) what the term "care coordination" meant to them; (3) the management (coordination) of their care by health professionals; (4) what, if any, possible changes to the healthcare system to aid care coordination.
Mongolia's experience shows that the process of developing a national plan, if carried out meticulously, with wide participation and sufficient time for stakeholder consultations, can provide an opportunity to advance ownership, build capacity and lead to better aid coordination in developing countries.
The Compact committed signatories to making concrete the 2005 Paris Declaration of Aid Effectiveness in the field of health: to improve aid coordination; increase the predictability of donor aid flows; work towards strengthened country health systems; and renew commitment to mutual accountability and transparency.
The increasing resources available for and number of partners providing health sector aid have stimulated innovations, notably, the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, which aim to improve aid coordination.
In this, one of the first studies to analyse implementation of aid coordination below national level, the aim was to investigate the effect of the Paris Declaration on coordination of health sector aid at the district level in Zambia.
Mrs. Ear, 31, is a policy adviser to the United Nations Development Program on aid coordination for Cambodia; she works in Phnom Penh.
To our knowledge, this is the first published study to assess the implementation of aid coordination in the health sector below the national level.
The assertion by some that billions of dollars in aid – a proportion of which has been channelled through government infrastructure - has done little to improve the lives of Haitians, or to enhance the country's governance and institutional capacity, somewhat supports donor decisions to explore alternatives to government-led aid coordination [ 57].
In Zambia, which has a long experience of aid coordination, the goal is to coordinate all resources and activities under the SWAP framework.
Surveys on health system effects of disease-specific programs unanimously report adverse effects in the area of governance with parallel bureaucracies, a general lack of aid coordination and integration to national systems [ 7, 15, 17, 52- 62].
This review examines how the concept of aid coordination, and its application to health systems, has evolved over the last two decades, and provides a base from which to consider further change.
