Sri Lanka Health Accounts

IHP health accounts team has been tracking national health expenditures in Sri Lanka since 1998. Following the initiative of Ministry of Health, a local expert group, led by Dr Rannan-Eliya (IHP Fellow) and reporting to the then MOH DDG (Planning) Dr Dalpatadu (IHP Senior Fellow), was tasked with developing a system to routinely track health spending in Sri Lanka. It was decided to adopt international standards in doing this, and in 2001 the first estimates of health spending compatible with the OECD System of Health Accounts (SHA 2000) standard were released for Sri Lanka. These covered the period 1990-1998. Sri Lanka was the second country in the world to implement the new SHA standard.

The IHP SLHA team has been updating these estimates ever since, producing annual updates each year, and continuously improving the methods and data. Most recently, the SLHA system was updated in 2015 to be able to report results according to the new international SHA 2011 standard. Currently, the SLHA system produces estimates of national health spending for every year since 1990, classifying spending by source of funds, provider and function, and at national, provincial and district levels.

IHP's SLHA estimates of national health expenditure in Sri Lanka are produced in three formats to be compliant with (a) Sri Lanka NHA standard (SLNHA), (b) System of Health Accounts 1.0 (SHA 1.0), and (c) System of Health Accounts 2011 (SHA 2011). The SLNHA format results for all available years are released in the regular SLHA publication. SHA 1.0 and SHA 2011 compatible results are provided in the regular print publication for selected years, and are available here for download as Excel files for all years.

IHP revises SLHA estimates on a continuous basis, as data and methods are revised and updated. Where data sources and methods have been changed this may result in loss of comparability with previously published estimates for earlier years. To address this, IHP will usually revise the full estimates for all the years to ensure the consistency over time. Users should always use the most recent electronic version published here, as estimates for all the years may have been changed.

IHP welcomes enquiries for more detailed tabulations and can undertake further analysis on request. For further information please contact us at .

Current Data Release

Issue date: 03/08/2021

Selected tables and charts from current SLHA release (465 KB)
SHA 1.0 tables 1990-2019 (489 KB)
SHA 2011 tables 1990-2019 (597 KB)

Dates of previous releases