Access to good quality, affordable, and appropriate health products is indispensable to advance universal health coverage, address health emergencies, and promote healthier populations.
Micronutrient deficiencies can cause several serious health issues. A lack of iron, folate and vitamins B12 and A can lead to anaemia. Anaemia is a condition in which there is a reduced number of red blood cells or haemoglobin concentration, causing fatigue, weakness, shortage of breath and dizziness. This can further lead to difficulties in functioning in work, education and community engagement. An estimated 42% of children under 5 years of age and 40% of pregnant women worldwide are anaemic.
WHO’s work in Health System Governance aims at empowering actors and increasing accountability, transparency and responsiveness of health systems through actions focused on:
Health impact
Sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs)
Taxing SSBs can lower consumption and encourage reformulation. It can reduce obesity, type 2 diabetes and tooth decay, especially for lower-income, less-educated and younger populations. Evidence shows that a tax on SSBs that increases the prices by 20% can reduce consumption by around 20%
Alcohol
Studies show that increasing the price of alcohol through higher taxes can reduce alcohol consumption and its related harms, and prevent drinking initiation.
Health systems can only function with health workers; improving health service coverage and realizing the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is dependent on their availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality.
WHO estimates a projected shortfall of 18 million health workers by 2030, mostly in low- and lower-middle income countries. However, countries at all levels of socioeconomic development face, to varying degrees, difficulties in the education, employment, deployment, retention, and performance of their workforce.
What constitutes a healthy diet may differ depending on the needs of the individual, locally available foods, dietary customs, cultural norms and other considerations. However, the basic principles of healthy eating remain the same for everyone. The nature of access to food requires broader solutions at the societal level to promote healthy and safe food options.
Heatwaves, or heat and hot weather that can last for several days, can have a significant impact on society, including a rise in heat-related deaths. Heatwaves are among the most dangerous of natural hazards, but rarely receive adequate attention because their death tolls and destruction are not always immediately obvious. From 1998-2017, more than 166 000 people died due to heatwaves, including more than 70 000 who died during the 2003 heatwave in Europe.
WHO's Global School Health Initiative, launched in 1995, seeks to mobilize and strengthen health promotion and education activities at the local, national, regional and global levels. The Initiative is designed to improve the health of students, school personnel, families and other members of the community through schools.
Health promoting schools focus on:
On the different types of taxes, excise taxes are the most important for promoting health because they change the cost of the taxed product relative to other goods.
Sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs)
Fiscal policies that lead to at least a 20% increase in the retail price of sugary drinks would result in significant reductions in consumption of such products.
Alcohol
Hendra virus (HeV) infection is a rare emerging zoonosis (disease that can be transmitted to humans from animals) that causes severe and often fatal disease in both infected horses and humans. The natural host of the virus has been identified as being fruit bats of the Pteropodidae Family, Pteropus genus.
WHO works with Member States and partners to support the implementation of the health accounts system towards the goal of countries attaining universal health coverage. Through the Health Accounts Country Platform, WHO provides countries with the accounting framework System of Health Accounts (SHA) 2011, tools and technical support to institutionalize and set up a harmonized, integrated platform for annual and timely collection of health expenditure data.
Health accounts are a way for countries to monitor health spending across multiple streams, regardless of the entity or institution that financed and managed that spending. They allow health administrators to learn from past expenditure and improve planning and allocation of resources throughout the system, thereby increasing efficiency and accountability. The system generates consistent and comprehensive data on health spending in a country, which in turn can contribute to evidence-based policy making.
Raising domestic public funds is essential for universal health coverage (UHC). No country has made significant progress toward UHC without increasing reliance on public revenues. Therefore, domestic tax systems that are essential to support country’s fiscal space expansion are central to the UHC agenda.
For all aspects of health, there are binding rules that govern the rights and responsibilities of governments, health workers, companies, civil society and a country’s population. Together these rules make up the legal framework, or legal architecture for health. They take many forms including: statutory laws, regulatory and administrative laws, contracts, case law, and customary laws. Who is involved in making these rules, and the form they take, differs from country to country.