Civil society feedback on the Zero Draft of the 2023 Political Declaration on UHC

The 2023 UN High-Level (HLM) Meeting on Universal Health Coverage (UHC) provides countries and all stakeholders with the opportunity to not just recommit to UHC but take concrete actions toward building resilient and equitable health systems. While some progress has been made since the 2019 HLM on UHC that resulted in a comprehensive Political Declaration, more than half of the world’s population still lacks access to essential health services. The situation was further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the UHC2030 Co-Chairs recently stated in their reflection on the UHC Political Declaration 2023 Zero Draft, Member States must show ...

Inter-Disciplinary Work in the Context of Integrated Care – a Theoretical and Methodological Framework

Inter-disciplinary team working is an essential mechanism for the delivery of integrated care. This paper summarises a narrative review of the research on the ‘work’ that teams do to develop inter-disciplinary practices, addressing the question ‘How do interdisciplinary teams ‘become’ in the context of models of integrated care?’.

The narrative review identities a gap in our understanding of the active boundary work that different disciplines working together to deliver care integration engage in when creating new interdisciplinary knowledge, creating an inter-disciplinary team identity and negotiating new social and power relations. This gap is particularly significant in relation to the role ...

Declaration of Astana

The Global Conference on Primary Health Care in Astana, Kazakhstan in October 2018 endorsed a new declaration emphasizing the critical role of primary health care around the world. The declaration aims to refocus efforts on primary health care to ensure that everyone everywhere is able to enjoy the highest possible attainable standard of health.

The new declaration has renewed political commitment to primary health care from Governments, non-governmental organizations, professional organizations, academia and global health and development organizations. It will be used to inform the UN General Assembly high-level meeting on UHC in 2019. The new declaration was also a ...

Operational Framework for Primary Health Care

The World Health Assembly in resolution WHA72.2 (2019) requests the Director-General inter alia “to develop, in consultation with, and with the involvement of more expertise from, Member States, and in time for consideration by the Seventy-third World Health Assembly, an operational framework for primary health care, to be taken fully into account in the WHO general programmes of work and programme budgets in order to strengthen health systems and support countries in scaling-up national implementation efforts on primary health care”. This operational framework builds on an initial draft that was prepared as part of a technical series to support ...

Integrated Care: Reflections on Change in Health Services

This book critically examines integrated care, looking at integration from an unconventional angle to reveal the tacit assumptions we make when we manage and change health services. Kaehne questions our premises on health services management, the motivations for change and the shortcomings of health policy in complex environments.

What is successful integrated community care (ICC)?

The ageing process vastly impacts the need for care and support, as it is often associated with a decrease in health and function. Governments of ageing populations are using “ageing in place” as the main policy perspective, in which people receive care and support in their personal environment. Although great value is within this perspective, recent studies accentuate that the location where people live vastly impacts their need for care and support. This highlights the need for the development of new, long-term care systems to address these challenges. Scholars argue that the issue can be resolved by implementing locally, integrated ...

Person-centred sexual and reproductive health: A call for standardized measurement

Person-centred sexual and reproductive health (PCSRH) care refers to care that is respectful of and responsive to people's preferences, needs, and values, and which empowers them to take charge of their own sexual and reproductive health (SRH). It is an important indicator of SRH rights and quality of care. Despite the recognition of the importance of PCSRH, there is a gap in standardized measurement in some SRH services, as well as a lack of guidance on how similar person-centred care measures could be applied across the SRH continuum. Drawing on validated scales for measuring person-centred family planning, abortion, prenatal ...

Citizen Leadership & Integrated Care Report

Integrated care is at its heart about health, social care and wider services being better coordinated around people, families, and communities. This requires those who plan, design, and deliver services to understand what is important to people on an individual and collective basis. People’s circumstances and aspirations may change with their health conditions and social situations and through new challenges arising in wider society. It is therefore important that opportunities to influence and co-produce services are not a one-off exercise, but rather are ongoing and responsive to people’s interests and perspectives.

Professor Robin Miller and Dr Caroline Jackson ...

Person-centred long-term care for older persons: a new Lancet Commission

The UN declared 2021–30 to be the Decade of Healthy Ageing, and efforts are being made to maximise the functional ability of people over their life course. Yet older people are marginalised and perceived as a burden, particularly those with ongoing loss in capacity. Nowhere is this more conspicuous than in the context of long-term care (LTC) worldwide, where older people in some settings encounter a loss of independence and other violations of their human rights. Such experiences can range from deprivation of liberty and loss of legal capacity and consent to coerced institutionalisation, exposure to abuse, neglect,and ...

Integration of HIV care into maternal and child health services in the global IeDEA consortium

The WHO recommends the integration of routine HIV services within maternal and child health (MCH) services to reduce the fragmentation of and to promote retention in care for pregnant and postpartum women living with HIV (WWH) and their infants and children exposed to HIV (ICEH). During 2020–2021, we surveyed 202 HIV treatment sites across 40 low- and middle-income countries within the global International epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA) consortium.