5175.0: Wednesday, October 24, 2001: 2:30 PM-4:00 PM | ||||
Oral Session | ||||
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| Evidence regarding changing burdens of disease around the world leads to increasing awareness of serious inadequacies of health care, including profound inequities. Efforts to reform health systems in order to achieve more effective, efficient and equitable services, including intersectoral linkages, are widely discussed but infrequently brought to fruition. And it is the poor and vulnerable who suffer the most, within both impoverished and well to do countries. We now see a mix of old and new approaches to health care that deserve close attention. First, there is primary health care, brought to global attention at Alma Ata two decades ago, cast aside by many, but retained by others as representing key principles and factors necessary to bring care to those in need. Then there are fresh approaches that carry potential for strengthening health services across the world. One of these is WHO's new Framework for Assessing Health System Performance, which seriously pursues such goals as improving health and reducing health inequalities, and enhancing responsiveness to the expectations of populations, as in respecting the dignity of persons. Another is Benchmarks of Fairness for Health Care Reform, developed originally for the U.S and now applied to generating policy change in developing countries by Norman Daniels and colleagues. It needs to be appreciated that these approaches are not competitors, but rather are partners that are complementary to one another. We can ask, therefore, how these three approaches provide strategies and tools that reinforce each other in improving the health of populations, taking into account both the distribution and fairness of those health gains. | ||||
| See individual abstracts for presenting author's disclosure statement. | ||||
| Learning Objectives: To understand harmful deficiencies in health systems, including inequities and unfairness distributed unevenly across populations. To appreciate how each of these health system components brings special strengths to health system development, some of them new to the field. And, of critical importance, to understand how the interactions of the separate components can achieve collective gains that each could not achieve alone. | ||||
| John H. Bryant, MD | ||||
| Benchmarks of fairness for health care reform: A policy tool for developing countries Norman Daniels, PhD | ||||
| Primary health care in a changing world: Experiences, lessons and continuing advances Henry B. Perry, MD, PhD | ||||
| WHO framework for measuring health system performance: conceptualization, challenges, responses Orvill Adams | ||||
| Sponsor: | International Health | |||
| Cosponsors: | Community Health Planning and Policy Development | |||
| CE Credits: | CME, Health Education (CHES), Nursing, Pharmacy, Social Work | |||