The National Health Accounts (NHA) is a critical tool to help policy makers understand and improve their health systems.  The NHA is a “systematic, comprehensive and consistent monitoring of resource flows in a country’s health system for a given period.  It reflects the main functions of health care financing: resource mobilization & allocation, pooling and insurance, purchasing of care and the distribution of benefits”.  

Mozambique is currently finalising the national Strategic Health Sector Plan for 2014-2019 (PESS 2014-2019). One of the pillars of the PESS 2014-2019 is creation of a health financing policy and strategy.  Health financing policy requires decisions on how to raise funds, how to pool them, and how to use them equitably and efficiently. To take these decisions, the Ministry of Health and partners will need reliable information on the quantity of financial resources used for health, their sources and the way they are used. National Health Accounts (NHA) provides evidence to monitor trends in health spending for all sectors- public and private, different health care activities, providers, diseases, population groups and regions in a country. It helps in developing national strategies for effective health financing and in raising additional funds for health. Information can be used to make financial projections of a country’s health system requirements and compare their own experiences with the past or with those of other countries. 

The last NHA was done in Mozambique in 2008 – updated data is necessary.  WHO, USAID and the Ministry of Health have begun a NHA which will analyse data from 2012.  This exercise will be completed by March 2014.  This NHA will use a revised methodology, which can provide more complex information, allow NHA data production annually and has been standardized to use information from important global health initiatives like GAVI Alliance, the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the Commission on Information and Accountability for Women and Children’s Health (CoIA). 

 NHA is most effective in developing health financing policy if it is generated annually – the “institutionalization” of NHA.  New NHA methods make institutionalization easier; WHO is working to support Mozambique to institutionalize the NHA.