Case Study of Ghana - Medical Devices and Biomaterials for the Developing World - page 26

Step 5: Weight by “essentiality” score of inventory items to create the facility score.
Weight average facility scores of different facility categories by density of facilities
(WHO 2010c) to create a dimensionless national “score”
We can then define the score for item A as

x

A

score =

(2.1)

A

y

A

∑

( score ) ( e )

i i

iABCDE = ,,, ,

score =

(2.2)

hosp

n

score is the score for the entire hospital or unit being considered, n is the
total number of items in the hospital ( n = 5 in this case), and e i is the measure of
“essentiality” for a given item. 1
For each category of health facility, we can assign an aggregate score that is the
simple average of each hospital's score:

where

hosp

= ∑

N

score

c

hosp i ,

score

i = 1

,

(2.3)

c

N

c

where N is the number of facilities in the category (provided by the WHO Baseline
country survey on medical devices) for a given nation.
Formulation of a single score for a nation based on its five category scores will
involve qualitative and quantitative assessments that take into account several fac-
tors, such as which facilities provide the majority of treatment, population distribu-
tion, and relative facility distribution, etc. Thus the ability of the MTS to approximate
reality is very much limited by the availability of data for these related factors.
In spite of this limitation, an attempt at a more complete example is provided in
Chap. 3 using inventories from Nicaraguan hospitals.

Agriculture

In addition to health care, agriculture is another sector that has been identified as a
priority in the context of Ghana's continued growth and advancement. As 70% of
the rural population (which is itself a majority of the Ghanaian population) is
involved in agricultural activities as a form of livelihood, there is real opportunity to
both generate revenue and increase the standard of living by making the sector more
effective. National trade policy has recently shifted the balance of exports and
imports in the agricultural sector (Abdulai and Egger 1992).

1 This measure is based on the Fenningkoh and Smith model (Appendix B ) , which uses a point
system to evaluate items based on function, risk, and required maintenance ( source : WHO Medical
device technical series).