What is the current stuation of the Turkish health financing system and how can it be improved? a study on sector actors

The needs are unlimited and resources are scarce in order to improve the health status of the population. This requires constant new research for the collection, pooling and allocatin of resources to service providers in an effective, productive, fair and sustainable manner. The aim of the study conducted in this direction is; to obtain stakeholder views on the strengths and weaknesses of the Turkish health financing system, to determine the areas that need to be improved by using stakeholder views, and to offer suggestions for the development of these areas. In the study, qualitative research methods were used in order to obtain more in-depth the views of the actors in the sector. As a data collection tool, a semi-structured interview form developed from the literature was used. The data obtained has been analysed with the help of the Nvivo programme. As a result of the analysis, 3 themes and 22 categories were created as "strengths", "weaknesses" and "aspects that can be improved". When looking at the findings of the study, the most emphasized categories in the theme of strengths of the system are; there has been access and fairness. Under the weaknesses of the system, payment methods and sustainability are the issues that are mostly commented on. The most emphasized categories in the theme of directions for improvement, which includes suggestions for the system; increasing the collected fund (contributions, premium payments and informality), regulations related to private insurance, regulations on repayment methods, and increasing citizen awareness. Looking at the resulting themes, we see that some common expressions take place under different themes.This situation stems from the foresight that while the system has superiority in issues such as access and equity, on the other hand, facilitating access at an excessive level may lead to sustainability problems in the future. Although there are categories in both strengths and weaknesses in the study, results for the development of weaknesses stand out. According to these results, in order to eliminate the weaknesses of the health services financing system in Turkey, increasing the contributions, increasing the social security premium payments, preventing unregistered employment, improving the referral chain, developing preventive medicine, raising awareness of the citizens about the use of health services and biomedical production it is recommended to increase.