Baltic Social Audit on System Leakage in Health Care and Licensing

The Baltics social audit, conducted concurrently in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 2002, measured the public's perception of the social phenomenon of corruption and their concrete experience with corrupt practices in the health care and licensing sectors.

 

Interviewers contacted over 10,000 households, representing almost 25,000 people in the region together with some 300 businesses and 100 health institutions. The goal of the social audit was to help reduce system leakages that result from petty corruption and to suggest actionable steps to improve the situation in the health and licencing sectors.

 

After the household level data were linked to reviews of health care institutions, processed through focus groups with communities and service providers, and discussed in national stakeholder workshops, communication strategies were developed to support the dissemination and application of findings in ways that will lead to multiple interventions for preventing corruption.

 

This social audit was commissioned by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in the framework of the Anti-Corruption Network for Transition Economies' Baltic Anti-Corruption Initiative.

A short summary of the results is available on: http://www.ciet.org/en/documents/projects_library_docs/2006226193431.pdf

CIET methods:

 

The cross design of social audit and evaluation techniques known as the CIETmethod, also known as sentinel community surveillance (SCS) or service delivery surveys (SDS)  tries to maintain epidemiological coherence while introducing the results of surveys for discussion between communities and planners.

 

The method relies on a panel of sentinel communities chosen and weighted to link the sample to the universe it represents. Cyclical contacts with these sentinel sites are effectively a concentration of measurement resources in time and place, an intense focus of quantitative and qualitative methods in a panel of mini universes. The ability to repeat measurement in the same place makes impact estimation relatively straightforward. These households can be contacted in successive cycles, perhaps a year or two years later, to measure differences over the period.

 

These differences can be related to programmatic input and other factors that might be vary across different sites. The impact assessment is based on the time sequence and the heterogeneity between sites. The CIET cross-design usually involves 120 contiguous households in each site to permit the analysis of local factors in the context of household-level occurrences.

 

Some environmental factors might be quantified easily (for example, presence of school, cost of drugs) or they may be more qualitative (adequacy of sanitation, level of participation in community affairs). If these factors affect the whole cluster, comparisons can be made between clusters or groups of clusters.

See CIET methods