Findings from the Field
What We're Reading: Week of April 1
- A new policy brief from WHO focuses on the importance of strategic purchasing to achieve universal health coverage, offering guidance to countries on how to improve health purchasing practices.
- “If we invest in the people closest to the problem we want to solve, we’re much more likely to be successful,” says Raj Panjabi, Co-Founder of Last Mile Health, in a Q&A with the The Daily Princetonian about strengthening primary health care.
- “If we fail to achieve UHC and the health-related SDG targets, [Africa] will likely suffer a loss of about 2.4 trillion international dollars annually.” WHO AFRO published a striking new report on the productivity cost of illness in Africa.
- Support from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria improves government accountability, control of corruption, political freedoms, regulatory quality, and rule of law, according to a new working paper from Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law.
- FT Health notes that the number of confirmed deaths from the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has passed 1,000, making it the second worst in history.
- A commentary in Milbank Quarterly argues that primary health care can improve the health of populations by 1) providing preventative and curative services that save lives, and 2) promoting the conditions that make people healthy.
- Africa could generate as much as $100 billion in economic gains in the next five years if annual health spending per person was increased by as little as $ 30.00, writes Matshidiso Moeti, Regional Director of the WHO Regional Office for Africa, in Reuters.