The State of the world’s nursing 2020 report provides the latest, most up-to-date evidence on and policy options for the global nursing workforce. It also presents a compelling case for considerable – yet feasible – investment in nursing education, jobs, and leadership.
The primary chapters... of the report outline the role and contributions of nurses with respect to the WHO “triple billion” targets; the health labour market and workforce policy levers to address the challenges to nurses working to their full potential; the findings from analysis of National Health Workforce Account (NHWA) data from 191 Member States and progress in relation to the projected shortfall of nurses by 2030; and forward-looking policy options for an agenda to strengthen the nursing workforce to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals, improve health for all, and strengthen the primary health care workforce on our journey towards universal health coverage.
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In the last decade, Timor-Leste has made remarkable progress in strengthening its health system and improving the health status of its population. This has resulted in an increased life expectancy, ...and the achievement of Millennium Development Goals such as a reduction in infant and under-five mortality, an improvement in maternal and child health outcomes, and an increase in immunization coverage. Further, the country has successfully eliminated infectious diseases such as polio, measles, and maternal and neonatal tetanus. There is full political commitment to reducing the incidence of tuberculosis (TB) by 80% and the number of deaths due to TB by 90% by 2030. The country has made great progress in the context of the pandemic, having established numerous quarantine facilities/isolation centres; trained health-care workers; streamlined the procurement and supply of medicines, consumables, personal protective equipment and other equipment; and strengthened the capacity in critical care across secondary and tertiary health care, to better respond to future pandemics and other disaster situations.
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This country cooperation strategy (CCS) outlines how the World Health Organization (WHO) will work with the Lao People’s Democratic Republic over the next five years (2024–2028), supporting the implementation of the five-year ...ute-to-highlight medbox">health sector development plans and the Health Sector Reform Strategy 2021–2030 to attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.
The Lao People’s Democratic Republic experienced substantial economic growth in the 30 years prior to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, contributing to reduced poverty and significant progress toward the SDGs. However, the COVID-19 pandemic brought this development to a halt. It was anticipated that the COVID-19 recovery and the tremendous population growth in recent years would provide opportunities for a shift toward more sustainable and inclusive development in the years ahead. In 2023, however, the contrary was the case. Rural residents, including many ethnic minorities, continued to face marginalization because of limited access to education, health care and economic opportunities.
Despite the challenges of COVID-19 and other disease outbreaks, the country has made significant improvements in health. Nonetheless, progress has been uneven and not everyone has benefited from these achievements. In the mountainous region, many people lack access to quality health care because of the unequal distribution of well-trained health-care workers. Preventable deaths due to poor-quality health care for children and newborns, infants and mothers remain a concern, as do communicable diseases such as sexually transmitted infections and tuberculosis. The increasing burden of noncommunicable diseases and the health impact of worsening climate change further heighten the need for strengthened and resilient health systems, which are at risk due to an underfunded health sector and weak economy.
This CCS aims to address remaining and future challenges as well as health needs while creating an impact that is sustainable. It identifies three strategic priorities and nine deliverables (Table 1) to support the attainment of the national vision of Health for all by all, as articulated in the 9th Health Sector Development Plan 2021–2025. It contributes to the country’s goals to achieve universal health coverage, graduate from least developed country status by 2026 and attain SDGs by 2030.
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WHO’s Country Cooperation Strategy (CCS) defines the Organization’s medium-term vision for working in and with a particular country. The CCS, developed in the context of global and national health priorities, examines the overall ...tribute-to-highlight medbox">health situation in a country, including the state of the health sector, socioeconomic status and the major health determinants.
This CCS sets out WHO’s strategic framework for collaboration with the Syrian Arab Republic, from June 2022 until June 2025, in light of the 12 years of crisis that have had a devastating impact on the health sector and infrastructure of basic services. It carefully considers the current and projected issues during its transition from continued humanitarian assistance to recovery, resilience and development. The consolidation of health policies and strategies and health system strengthening, based on the strengthening of primary health care (PHC), aims to contribute to the achievement of national and global development and health goals and the targets of the SDGs.
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Updated 17 April 2020
Improving care for women during pregnancy and around the time of childbirth to prevent and treat pre-eclampsia and eclampsia is a necessary step towards the achievement of the health targets of the Sustainable Development ...n class="attribute-to-highlight medbox">Goals (SDGs). Efforts to prevent and reduce morbidity and mortality due to these conditions can help address the profound inequities in maternal and perinatal health globally. To achieve this, healthcare providers, health managers, policy makers and other stakeholders need up-to-date and evidence-informed recommendations to guide clinical policies and practices.
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The ICOPE guidance for person-centred assessment and pathways in primary care (ICOPE Handbook) helps community health and care workers put the recommendations outlined in the ICOPE Guidelines into practice. The Handbook assists with setting person-c...entred goals, screening for loss in a range of domains of intrinsic capacity and assessing health and social care needs to develop a personalised care plan. The care plan may include multiple interventions to manage declines in intrinsic capacity, provide social care and support, support self-management and support caregivers. The domains of intrinsic capacity include cognitive decline, limited mobility, malnutrition, visual impairment, hearing loss and depressive symptoms.
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Progress in reducing tobacco use is a key indicator for measuring countries’ efforts to implement the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control – target 3.a under the Sustainable Development Goals agenda. Countries have adopted this indicator ...to report progress also towards the tobacco reduction target under the Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases 2013–2020 and the WHO’s Global Programme of Work triple billions target.
Fourth edition.
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The Global Breast Cancer Initiative, established by WHO in 2021, will provide guidance to governments on health systems strengthening for breast cancer. This illustrated summary outlines its goals, ...rationale and framework.
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The WHO End TB Strategy aims to end the global TB epidemic by 2030, in alignment with Goal 3 of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Member States of the World Health Organi...zation (WHO) and the UN committed to ending the TB epidemic through adoption of WHO’s End TB Strategy and the UN SDGs in 2014 and 2015, respectivel
Almost half of the deaths worldwide caused by TB in 2019 occurred in the WHO South-East Asia Region, home to around a quarter of the global population. Maintaining robust progress in this Region is therefore essential if the global goal of ending the TB epidemic is to be realized. Despite substantial gains made in the Region, the threat to
health worldwide posed by the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to reverse these gains and eclipse the focus on the global TB emergency.
While continuing to tackle COVID-19-related challenges, countries will need to rapidly and urgently deploy supplementary measures to address the large numbers of missed cases, poor treatment outcomes and, potentially, a higher TB burden.
The Regional Strategic Plan towards Ending TB in the Region 2021–2025 clearly articulates priority interventions, analyses the challenges, bottlenecks and opportunities, and focuses on implementation considerations in the Region.
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Countries are making progress toward the global goal of 95% of people living with HIV knowing their status by 2025. However, considerable gaps remain in achieving these goals globally. Men in high HIV burden settings and men from key populations in ...all settings are consistently less likely to know their HIV status than women. Globally, 78% of men ages 15 years and older who are living with HIV are aware of their HIV status, compared with 86% of women with HIV of these ages.
Offering HIV testing services, including HIV self-testing, at formal and informal workplaces has emerged as an effective, acceptable and feasible approach for reaching men. A 2018 World Health Organization (WHO) and International Labour Organization (ILO) policy brief provides key guiding principles for HIVST implementation at workplaces. Building on the 2018 policy brief, this brief captures early experience with HIVST implementation at workplaces and discusses emerging approaches of sustainable financing that can be adapted for HIV self-testing at workplaces.
The primary audiences for this policy brief are ministries of health and labour, national HIV programmes, employers’ organizations, workers’ organizations (labour unions), enterprises, implementing partners, including civil society organizations, and health insurance agencies.
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Over the past decade, the reduction of maternal mortality in Latin America and the Caribbean has shown signs of a marked slowdown and in some cases a reversal, jeopardizing commitments made at the global and regional levels and by the Member States themselves, including those established in the Sust...ainable Development Goals.
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Integrating neglected tropical diseases into global health and development: fourth WHO report on neglected tropical diseases evaluates the changing global public health landscape; assesses progress ...towards the 2020 targets; and considers the possible core elements of a strategic vision to integrating neglected tropical diseases into the 2030 Agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Advances have been made through expanded interventions delivered through five public health approaches: innovative and intensified disease management; preventive chemotherapy; vector ecology and management; veterinary public health services; and the provision of safe water, sanitation and hygiene. In 2015 alone nearly one billion people were treated for at least one disease and significant gains were achieved in relieving the symptoms and consequences of diseases for which effective tools are scarce; important reductions were achieved in the number of new cases of sleeping sickness, of visceral leishmaniasis in South-East Asia and also of Buruli ulcer.
The report also considers vector control strategies and discusses the importance of the draft WHO Global Vector Control Response 2017–2030. It argues that veterinary public health requires a multifaceted approach across the human–animal interface as well as a multisectoral programme of work to protect and improve the physical, mental and social well-being of humans, including veterinary, water, sanitation and hygiene.
Integration of activities and interventions into broader health systems is crucial, and despite challenges, has the potential to accelerate progress towards universal health coverage while advancing the 2030 Agenda.
In short, this report drives the message home that “no one must be left behind”.
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The Annual Report summarizes what has been achieved in the year 2022, how WHO supported the country priority, how WHO took the lead in health in bringing together partners to help the country achieve its strategic ... medbox">goals as a result be on track on its commitment on the SDG goals. The report also highlights what were the gaps in the year there by subsequent planning years should consider the challenges for better results.
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This document is an output of a WHO cross-programme initiative aiming to improve the prevention, diagnosis and management of anaemia and thereby accelerate reduction in its prevalence. It comes at an important time, midway through the era of the Sustainable Development ...light medbox">Goals, when progress in reducing anaemia has stagnated. This framework is based on the core principles of primary health care: meeting people’s health needs through comprehensive promotive, protective, curative, and rehabilitative care along the life course; systematically addressing the broader determinants of health; and empowering individuals, families, and communities to optimize their health
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This checklist is for any organization or person supporting the routine use of evidence in
the process of policy-making. Evidence-informed policy-making (EIPM) is essential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and universal ...class="attribute-to-highlight medbox">health coverage (UHC). Its importance is emphasized in WHO’s Thirteenth General Programme of
Work 2019–2023 (GPW13). This checklist was developed by the WHO Secretariat of Evidence-Informed Policy Network (EVIPNet) to assist its Member countries in institutionalizing EIPM. Government agencies (i.e. the staff of the Ministry of Health),
knowledge intermediaries and researchers focused on strengthening EIPM will find in this checklist some key steps and tools to help their work. While the health sector is a key target group for EVIPNet, this tool can be applied by stakeholders from
different social sectors
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This document provides technical guidance on concepts, definitions, indicators, criteria, milestones and tools to assist leprosy programmes in their journey towards the goals of interruption of transmission and elimination of leprosy disease and thr...ough the post-elimination period. Importantly, it provides criteria with benchmarks, where possible, for all key aspects of leprosy programmes and services. Not only those related to elimination efforts, but also those related to diagnosis and management of leprosy, leprosy-related disabilities, mental wellbeing, stigma and discrimination and inclusion and participation of persons affected by leprosy. The document emphasises that the elimination of leprosy is a long-term, continuous journey on the one hand, while, on the other, clear milestones can be recognised on the way and programme implementation can be assessed against benchmarks, guiding appropriate action to keep the programme on track.
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This report highlights the work of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Zimbabwe towards contributing to the triple billion targets in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs
This document is intended for countries, foundations, and civil society. It provides a consolidated overview of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, its goals, and the investments that partners have calculated are required to carry out it...s mission. Emergency responses are dynamic by nature. The ACT-Accelerator will regularly adjust its investment needs and update this document as understanding of COVID-19 epidemiology and additional data on the ACT tools become available. For more detailed analysis on the ACT investments for its work in diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines, please refer to the costed plans of the relevant ‘pillar’. At the time of publication, the investments required for the Health Systems Connector pillar were still under development.
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Japan has been implementing projects of global extension of medical technologies under an official development assistance policy to improve public health and medicine by promoting Japanese medical technologies worldwide. The current work examines th...e impact and goals of implementing this new scheme. The scheme has involved dozens of projects that sent Japanese experts to partner countries and that invited their counterparts to Japan to showcase Japanese medical technologies. Approximately 50 projects have been implemented in 24 countries over 5 years, and 19,638 individuals have been trained. As a result, the introduced technology was adopted in national guidelines in 4 projects and the introduced equipment was procured in the partner country in 17 projects. In total, 912,334 individuals have benefitted from the introduction of these medical technologies. The concept of "creating shared value" (CSV) could help promote project success by both creating economic value and encouraging social progress. However, the sustainability of that business model remains in question in terms of the internationalization of CSV. Several successful projects improved medical care and led to new business opportunities.
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The International Conference on Population and Development in 1994 set targets for donor funding to support family planning programmes, and recent initiatives such as FP2020 have renewed focus on the need for adequate funding to rights-based family planning. Disbursements supporting family planning ...disaggregated by donor, recipient country and year are not available for recent years. We estimate international donor funding for family planning in 2003–13, the period covering the introduction of reproductive health targets to the Millennium Development Goals and up to the beginning of FP2020, and compare funding to unmet need for family planning in recipient countries. We used the dataset of donor disbursements to support reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health developed by the Countdown to 2015 based on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Creditor Reporting System.
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