Abstract
Health Policy Evaluation for the Elderly persons Problems of health policy for elderly population in Thailand were the uncertainty of how well the policy has met the elderly’s health needs and covered such a group. Additionally, life quality resulted from the policy implementation and supportive system to the policy were less evaluated than the quantity of policy coverage. The elderly policy evaluation in this study was to review formal document relevant to the policy, to interview and observe key stakeholders including a number of policy makers, health administrators at provincial and district level and key health officials at community level. These key informants were sampled by multi-stage sampling technique. The current policy for the elderly aims at encouraging 70% or more elderly to have proper self-care behaviors, having 50% or more aged people receive comprehensive care from public health facilities and expanding free health care for all elderly. The policy comprised health care plan, health promotion plan, health behavior development plan and health insurance plan. The study found problems of putting the policy into practice for example lack of actual supportive system e.g. budgeting system and health official incentive system, lack of proper information based planning system. The policy evaluation was more likely to evaluate in terms of coverage than quality of policy implementation. Health promotion was much emphasized at the operational level while health services needs were largely unmet.
