Countries with poor health should develop better primary health systems, according to a major report published today.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) launched its World Health Report 2008 yesterday.
The report examines how health care is organised, financed, and delivered in a large number of both rich and poor countries.
WHO found many failures and shortcomings that have "left the health status of different populations, both within and between countries, dangerously out of balance". To tackle these "inequities and inefficiencies", the focus must turn to primary health care, say the experts.
Recommendations in the report must be heeded, said WHO Director-General Margaret Chan at the launch of the report in Almaty, Kazakhstan. "A world that is greatly out of balance in matters of health is neither stable nor secure," she added.
The report comes 30 years after the Alma-Ata International Conference on Primary Health Care in 1978, an event which put health equity on the international political agenda.
There is still a 40-year difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest countries, the report shows, and 58 million of the 136 million women who will give birth this year will receive no medical assistance whatsoever.
Government expenditure on health varies from 20 US dollars to over 6,000 US dollars per person per year. "Conditions of inequitable access, impoverishing costs, and erosion of trust in health care constitute a threat to social stability," the report warns.
It recommends a return to the model of primary health care, because "countries where health care is organised around the tenets of primary health care produce a higher level of heath for the same investment".
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