World Health Day - Universal Health Coverage- is it possible?

World Health Day is held on the 7th April
This year the theme was promoting Universal Health Coverage.

UHC means that all individuals and communities can access health services It includes all sectors from health promotion, to in patient and out patient care. A key factor is access, cost and affordability for all

View the WHO resolution on this
and statement by the WHO director in 2019

What progress is being made?

In 2017 a  joint monitoring report from the World Bank and the World Health Organization found that despite some progress on UHC, at least half of the world’s population still cannot obtain essential health services

In a more recent Lancet article Mark Moses et al
reviewed 'Funding and services needed to achieve universal health coverage: applications of global, regional, and national estimates of utilisation of outpatient visits and inpatient admissions from 1990 to 2016, and unit costs from 1995 to 2016' . Globally, they estimated the gap to UHC to be I$1177·69 billion (international dollars; 95% uncertainty interval 896·05–1456·56)

A recent blog posting on the World Economic Forum website highlights challenges and changes that may need to be made.

African Civil Society organisations stated in December 2018 'Many international agencies and NGOs do not understand the African context' and put forward a set of proposals for reform.

In 2018 Oxfam highlighted problems in implementing UHC due to inequality

In July 2017, the IDS hosted a workshop in collaboration with Future Health Systems, the Impact Initiative, the Open Society Foundations, Unequal Voices, and Health Systems Global, to develop new thinking and practical approaches to improving accountability relationships and processes in favour of greater health equity. Access papers relating to this.

In 2018 Health Systems Global has  reports on the role of the private sector in Health services provision.

Further research 

Good places to look include: 

Pubmed is always good for abstracts of recent high quality academic articles. With the emphasis on medical

UHC2030 is a global movement of countries and organisations which seeks to implement UHC provision. Its website has plans and progress reports

The World Bank website provides access to further reports and news covering UHC
Likewise the main WHO website also has updates
the IOM outlines its efforts in this recent posting

Management Sciences For Health, a nonprofit health organization has a section on its website which aims to gather together publications and reports on UTC and global health security

The Save the Children Resource Library also has  copies of its own reports, plus those from other aid agencies and some international organisations on this topic.