The world is off track to make significant progress towards universal health coverage (UHC) (SDG target 3.8) by 2030 as improvements to health serv
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ices coverage have stagnated since 2015, and the proportion of the population that faced catastrophic levels of out-of-pocket (OOP) health spending has increased.
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Second Generation, WHO Country Cooperation Strategy, 2010–2015, Namibia
At the end of 2023, WHO convened our first-ever annual WHO Stakeholder Review Conference for Prevention and Response to Sexual Misconduct. Aimed at joint learning and frank discussion on challenges
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faced in the achieving zero tolerance for all forms of sexual misconduct by aid workers, the Conference brought together Member States, Civil Society Organizations, United Nations Agencies and Programmes, academia and media joined by WHO personnel. A set of recommendations to support all agencies are documented in the Conference Report. In addition, WHO’s Director-General hosted a social engagement segment on the evening of Day 1 to further underscore the centrality of a victim and survivor-centred approach, to celebrate progress however small, and to reaffirm commitment and renew energy for the journey ahead. The Conference took place on 30 November and 1 December 2023 in Geneva, Switzerland
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The 2023 Country Presence Report provides an overview of what WHO does in countries to advance towards the SDGs and implement GPW13, how we do it, with whom we work, and what is needed to overcome challenges for achieving results and impact in count
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ries.
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2nd edition. This new edition provides policy-makers, programme managers and health-service providers with the latest evidence-based guidance on clinical care. It includes information on how to establish and strengthen services, and outlines a human
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-rights-based approach to laws and policies on safe, comprehensive abortion care. This guidelines is available in English; French, Spanish; Japanese; Russian; Portuguese; Romanian and Ukrainian
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This report is the first of its kind. It brings together various data sets to present the current status of hand hygiene, highlight lagging progress, and call governments and supporting agencies to action, offering numerous inspiring examples of change.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, hand hygiene
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received unprecedented attention and became a central pillar in national COVID prevention strategies. However, concern with hand hygiene should not only be as temporary public health measure in times of crisis, but as a vital everyday behaviour that contributes to health and economic resilience. Hand hygiene is a highly cost-effective investment, providing outsized health benefits for relatively little cost.
Despite efforts to promote hand hygiene, the rates of access to hand hygiene facilities remain stubbornly low. If current rates of progress continue, by the end of the SDG era in 2030, 1.9 billion people will still lack facilities to wash their hands at home.
This report presents a compelling case for investment in five key ‘accelerators’ as a pathway towards achieving hand hygiene for all – governance, financing, capacity development, data and information, and innovation. These accelerators are identified under the UN-Water SDG 6 Global Acceleration Framework.
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During the year 2022, COVID-19 continued to be a significant challenge in Eritrea as in many other countries across the world. As COVID-19 devastated communities around the world,
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WHO worked with the MoH to strengthen the National and Sub-National health systems in order to meet community needs and mitigate the devastation during the pandemic and beyond.
One of the major achievements in the year 2022 was the beginning of the journey towards validation of
the elimination of mother to child transmission of HIV, syphilis, and hepatitis B. This is the culmination of years
of commitment and determination by the political leadership, national and international partnerships to
reduce the associated indices to levels that qualify for elimination.
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Children continue to be exposed to powerful food marketing, which predominantly promotes foods high in saturated fatty acids, trans-fatty acids, free sugars and/or sodium and uses a wide variety of marketing strategies that are likely to appeal to children. Food marketing has a harmful impact on chi
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ldren’s food choice and their dietary intake, affects their purchase requests to adults for marketed foods and influences the development of their norms about food consumption. Food marketing is also increasingly recognized as a children’s rights concern, given its negative impact on several of the rights enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.This WHO guideline provides Member States with recommendations and implementation considerations on policies to protect children from the harmful impact of food marketing, based on evidence specific to children and to the context of food marketing. Guidelines on other policies to improve the food environment are currently under development.
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This integrated operational framework provides an overview of the connections between mental health, neurological and substance use (MNS) conditions, and their links to health, well-being and the br
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oader public health and sustainable development agenda. The need for integrated approaches is increasingly recognized as critical to address the complex interactions between mental health, brain health, substance use, and physical health, particularly in light of global threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The framework also provides a series of actions for governments and health service planners and advisors to achieve integration across four domains: leadership and governance; care services; promotion and prevention; and health information systems, evidence generation and research.
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This sourcebook aims to detail why health needs to be part of urban and territorial planning and how to make this happen. It brings together two vital elements we need to build habitable cities on a habitable planet: 1) Processes to guide the develo
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pment of human settlements – in this document referred to as “urban and territorial planning (UTP)”; and 2) concern for human health, well-being and health equity at all levels – from local to global, and from human to planetary health.
This sourcebook identifies a comprehensive selection of existing resources and tools to support the incorporation of health into UTP, including advocacy frameworks, entry points and guidance, as well as tools and illustrative case studies. It does not provide prescriptions for specific scenarios – these should be determined by context, people and available resources.
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Advising principles. The purpose of this document is to support competent authorities in charge of IHR implementation to improve national capacities for the prevention, detection and control of events, by strengthening communications and coordination between points of entry and the national
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health surveillance system
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The WHO standard: Universal access to rapid tuberculosis diagnostics sets benchmarks to achieve universal access to WHO-recommended rapid diagnostics (WRDs), increase bacteriologically confirmed tub
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erculosis and drug resistance detection, and reduce the time to diagnosis. WHO-recommended rapid diagnostics are highly accurate, cost-effective, reduce the time to treatment initiation, and impact patient-important outcomes.
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Strengthening rehabilitation in health emergency preparedness, response, and resilience: policy brief outlines the evidence for rehabilitation in emergencies and the need for greater preparedness of rehabilitation services. It shows how existing gui
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delines support the integration of rehabilitation in emergencies and sets out the steps that decision-makers can take to better integrate rehabilitation into health emergency preparedness and response.
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