Systems for health: everyone has a role
Flagship report of the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research
This Report defines systems for health as those ready to respond to both the known and unknown, present and future threats. Systems for health anticipate and address social, economic, environmental and commercial drivers of health to secure and enable healthier societies by aligning efforts to ensure health security and create healthy populations, systems for health not only provide, protect, and promote health, but also harness technology working with people and communities to deliver physical, mental and social health for all populations across the life course.
This report provides actionable guidance for policy and practice and is a significant contribution to our future health. From the recommendations in the report, three major highlight includes:
- First, the report recommends identifying indicators for systems for health. This is not about creating new indicators, instead it is about consolidating a select group of indicators so that we can measure and monitor progress to create systems for health.
- Second, we must recognize and emphasize commonalities across efforts to realize systems for health. Ensuring health security, creating healthy populations and creating access to health services—these are often separate goals, but there are many commonalities across these efforts.
- Third, establishing systems for health requires investing in the local generation of research to illuminate how the broader drivers of health as well as social and political context interact to create health.
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2, Health systems frameworks and their limitations, focuses on health systems
frameworks, their utility and limitations. It reviews existing thinking on health
systems, demonstrating how broader socioeconomic and political forces
have influenced and shaped our understanding.
Chapter 3: Systems for health: the importance of healthy populations. This chapter explains about four software elements in the wider context of
efforts to create healthy populations that address the broader drivers of
health. Through examples, it highlights how investments in these elements
have enabled countries to create healthy populations. The chapter
underlines why an emphasis on the creation of healthy populations is
foundational to the development of future health systems.
Chapter 4: Systems for health: the importance of health security. This chapter highlights how efforts to address
these software elements have enabled health systems to manage the
health emergency comparatively well; country examples are included.
It underscores the importance of foregrounding these issues in the
reimagination of health systems as systems for health
Chapter 5, Realizing systems for health, is last and conluding chapter that explores the various linkages between healthy populations and health security; and it demonstrates the benefits of aligning our responses to these two challenges. It goes on to provide practical recommendations on how policy-makers, implementers, communities and development partners can realize systems for health: Realizing systems for health.
Reference:
Shroff ZC, Marten R, Hanson K, editors. Systems for health: everyone has a role. Flagship report of the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2022. Licence: CC BYNC-SA 3.0 IG
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