Professional accountability for women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health: what mechanisms and processes are used, what works?

Overview

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) for women’s children’s and adolescents’ health (WCAH) requires strengthening accountability processes within health systems to increase performance and quality of services, and ultimately improve population health outcomes. Guidance, however, on how best to implement accountability mechanisms for WCAH, is lacking. To better inform WCAH policies and programmes, this paper presents the scope and characteristics of, and evidence behind professional accountability mechanisms aimed at improving health system performance. To ensure learning across a variety of contexts, this global review includes evidence from high-, middle- and low-income settings.