The World Health Organization (WHO) is celebrating World Health Day (April 7th) with a campaign to promote universal health coverage (UHC). Guaranteeing access to needed health services of good quality is also one of the targets of Sustainable Development Goal number 3 and a focus area of technical work by the WHO Barcelona Office, housed in the Sant Pau Art Nouveau Site.
One of the campaign’s central messages is that no one should have to choose between good health and other life necessities. In fact, the campaign website indicates that 800 million people (almost 12 percent of the world’s population) spend at least 10 percent of their household budgets on health expenses for themselves, a sick child or other family member, incurring so-called “catastrophic expenditures”.
In contrast to these figures, UHC would enable everyone to access the services that address the most important causes of disease and death, without suffering financial hardship, while also ensuring that the quality of those services is good enough to improve the health of the people who receive them.
UHC is not only about medical treatment for individuals, but also includes services for whole populations such as public health campaigns – for example adding fluoride to water or controlling the breeding grounds of mosquitoes that carry viruses that can cause disease.
In the WHO European Region, most countries do well in providing universal population coverage for a wide range of health services, but all of them can do better to secure financial protection, especially for poorer people. New analysis finds that households in the poorest fifth of the population are most likely to experience catastrophic health spending, often due to out-of-pocket payments for medicines. They are also most likely to forego or delay seeking care due to cost and other barriers to access.
In the coming months, the WHO Barcelona Office will publish a series of individual reports on financial protection in 25 European countries. The context-specific analysis in these reports is generating evidence that policy-makers can use to ensure out-of-pocket payments do not push people into poverty.
The WHO affirms that truly universal health coverage is feasible if there is a shift from designing health systems around diseases and institutions towards health services designed around and for people. Everyone has a role to play in making this change possible, for example, by promoting and contributing to a structured dialogue on the policies that will support the move towards attaining and maintaining UHC.
To learn more about what governments, healthcare professionals, civil society organizations and the media can do, visit the campaign website.
More information on financial hardship linked to out-of-pocket payments here.
Read a comparative study on financial protection in high-income countries here.