Dear HIFA colleagues,
An extract below from the latest article on Health Policy Watch (by Anil Soni, CEO of the WHO Foundation) and a comment from me.
Read online: https://healthpolicy-watch.news/global-health-needs-more-than-money/
'WHO’s greatest value is not that it delivers services directly. Its value lies in helping countries identify, scale, and sustain what works: setting evidence-based norms and guidelines, coordinating surveillance and emergency response, convening governments around shared priorities, and supporting countries to adapt global knowledge into effective national action.'
COMMENT (NPW): I'm not sure about the value of the title 'Global Health Needs More than Money', but I agree with the above and I would add that it's vital that all organisations, including WHO, work to their strengths and prioritise those activities that they are uniquely positioned to undertake.
This includes WHO's role in the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA's describes the ecosystem as having six components: generate, publish, synthesise, package, avail and apply evidence. WHO clearly has a role in all six, among which arguably one stands out in particular: evidence synthesis and the development of international clinical and policy guidelines.
WHO also has an important, largely unfulfilled role in leadership of the global evidence ecosystem. The purpose of the ecosystem is universal access to reliable healthcare information: a world where every person, every health worker and every policymaker has access to the reliable healthcare information they need to protect their own health and the health of others. HIFA has been encouraging WHO for 20 years to champion this goal. In the past few years there have been encouraging signs that WHO is on the verge of making this explicit. (I'm developing a tabular graphic to illustrate this, which I'll put on the HIFA website shortly.)
All of the above has been greatly helped by the HIFA Global Consultation on Universal access to reliable healthcare information, in which many of you took part.
When we have meaningful political and financial commitment to strengthen the global evidence ecosystem, this will be a game-changer for global health.
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org