The President of the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF), Cristina Herrero, gave a lecture today as part of the Gaspar Casal Foundation’s Executive Programme on Value-Based Healthcare Management, focusing on the need to boost public leadership to transform organisations and move towards more innovative institutions such as AIReF.
Cristina Herrero began by explaining the origin and functions of AIReF, an institution created in 2013 to ensure the sustainability of public finances and focused on fiscal supervision. Since 2017, it has also taken on a new role as an evaluator of public policies and today it is a clear example that with leadership it is possible to do things differently and transform organisations.
The President stated that AIReF is an innovative institution in Spain with four distinctive features that set it apart: independence, transparency, rigour and usefulness. In her words, it is a totally independent institution that does not take instructions from the Government, is committed to accountability and pursues a communication policy based on maximum transparency.
Furthermore, it carries out rigorous data-based analyses, offers secure data processing (it is certified in accordance with the National Security Scheme) and publishes them on its website, where it also makes its methodologies transparent. It also seeks to be useful for society as a whole: for General Government authorities through its recommendations and proposals, for the fiscal debate and for the public.
Cristina Herrero quoted several examples of public policies in the health sector that have been subject to AIReF’s evaluations, both within the framework of the Spending Review, the exercise commissioned by the Central Government at the request of the European Commission, and the evaluations requested by the Autonomous Regions. Specifically, she reviewed some of the studies and results on prescription drugs, spending on pharmacy and capital goods and evaluations on human resources in healthcare commissioned by the ARs of Extremadura, the Balearic Islands and Navarre.
