Australian Aid to PNG - AusAID

• Provided core funding to the PNG Institute for Medical Research in recognition ofits contribution to malaria research, as well as broader disease control studies,including in the area of HIV and pneumonia and operational research supportinghealth delivery.• Enhanced operational efficiency of hospital services in 5 base hospitals, through anumber of planning, administrative, financial and human resource managementimprovements.• Provided technical assistance for development of annual work programs,budgeting and financial management in 6 provincial hospitals and 20 provincialhealth departments.• Improved and broadened the skills and knowledge base of PNG medical students,specialists, and residents by providing Australian medical specialists for shortperiods each year for cost-effective in-country training and consultancy servicesto hospitals. This assistance has also yielded less tangible benefits such asgoodwill between the medical professions of both countries.• Established PNG’s first degree-level health administration course.• Introduced a new student-centred curriculum at the University of Papua NewGuinea medical faculty.• Provided extensive training for medical officers, including 99 specialist medicalofficers (there were no such PNG specialists in the early 1970s).• Provided extensive training for nurses, biomedical technicians, rural health staff,hospital staff, specialist STD clinic workers, district health workers, healthadministrators, and hospital Board members and chief executives.At this stage, higher order outcomes of individual health projects are difficultto measure because the vast bulk of Australia’s programmed assistance in thehealth sector has only been provided in the last five years, and improvementsin key health indicators tend to take place over a much longer time frame.Also, it is difficult to isolate the effects of individual projects on healthindicators, since there are many other factors that can affect health status, suchas access to clean water, health education, access to transport networks, etc.According to the Health Sector Monitoring and Review Group, the healthsystem is only responsible for about 20% of the impact on mortality etc, withmost impact attributable to external factors. Further, there is evidence thatpopulation figures were miscalculated during the 1990 census, which will haveaffected the reliability of a number of commonly used indicators of healthtrends. With these caveats, examination of improvements in social indicators(see Section 1) indicates that, while Papua New Guinea’s health status remainsextremely poor when compared with other similar countries, there have in factbeen a number of marked improvements since independence. Life expectancy,while still low, has improved significantly. Infant and child mortality rates have44 The Contribution of Australian Aid to Papua New Guinea’s Development 1975–2000