The 2015 Nepal Health Facility Survey (NHFS) is an assessment of health care facilities in the formal sector of Nepal. It was designed to provide information on the availability of basic and essential health care services and the readiness of health facilities to provide quality services to clients.
The main objectives of the 2015 NHFS were to:
- Assess the availability of basic and essential services in Nepal health facilities, including maternal and newborn care and child health, family planning, and reproductive health services, as well as services for NCDs and certain infectious diseases (HIV/AIDS, STIs, malaria, and TB).
- Assess the preparedness of health facilities in Nepal to provide quality services.
- Provide a comprehensive body of information on the performance of different types of health facilities that provide these essential services.
- Identify gaps in the support services, resources, and processes used to provide health services that may limit the ability of facilities to provide quality services.
- Describe the processes followed in the provision of essential health care services and the extent to which accepted standards for quality service provision are met.
- Identify differences in service readiness among ecological regions, facility types, and managing authorities and in the 14 earthquake-affected districts.
- Provide a baseline assessment for tracking future progress.
The 2015 NHFS provides representative results for Nepal, for different facility types (public hospitals, primary health care centers [PHCCs], health posts [HPs], urban health centers [UHCs], standalone HIV testing and counseling sites [HTCs], and private hospitals), for different managing authorities (government and private), for each of the three geo-ecological regions in the country, the survey was also designed for representative results for each of the 13 development-ecological zones and for the area affected by the 2015 earthquake (14 districts). Stratification was achieved by separating the health facilities by facility type within each of the 13 development-ecological zones. Private hospitals were further stratified by number of inpatient beds (more than 100 or less than 100).