OVERVIEW STATEMENT
Towards Health For All
This is a resource platform for conversations between activists, implementers, researchers and policy-makers on global and national health issues that are important for progress towards Health for All the Right to Health and Healthcare. It aims to provide curated access to knowledge resources relevant to these goals and disseminates the relevant work on these themes by the resource collective that has organized this website.
RECENT
Conversations On Health Policy
The Ayushman-Bharat- Health and Wellness Scheme(AB-HWC), launched in 2018, is India’s big hope to deliver on the promise of universal and comprehensive primary health care- a logical extension of the efforts that the National Health Mission,2005 had begun. Its success would have paved the way for the realization of the right to healthcare. But in its rapid scaling up there has been weak conceptual clarity and many essential features of the scheme are under threat. Can the situation be retrieved? In this conversation, three public health practitioners who have been closely associated with its design and/or implementation discuss some of the urgent course corrections that the public health community could help with….
A critical reading of the Progress Update is essential for those in engaged in practice or research in health systems and health policy. This conversation addresses some of the technical challenges of measurement, and implicitly its politics. What we measure as progress is closely related to where we want to go and how we intend to get there. To the average health manager and the health activist this could be heavy reading, but we hope that this conversation helps demystify health metrics, and make for more informed participation in “evidence-based decision making”.
The chronic shortfall of specialist skills in CHCs, cripples our ability to universalize comprehensive primary health care. Such skills are essential to provide referral support and continuity of care to primary care providers and patients. The persistence of the problem and the failure of many efforts to address this shortfall should lead us to introspect on basic design flaws. Drawing on national and international experience, we discuss how this gap can and must be addressed and that too on a priority basis…
We are drawing attention to this recent publication from the regional WHO. In this introduction we highlight one context – the shift from selective to comprehensive care. We hope these case stories help the reader understand the complex nature of this shift, and provides grounds for optimism, that despite the challenges, such a change is feasible…..
The ESI is an amazing institution covering over 10% of the population. The ESI is conceptualized within a health rights framework and offers a basket of benefits that no other insurance programme even attempts. Yet when experts talk of UHC or publicly funded health insurance, the ESI is almost never mentioned. Performance in terms of delivery of benefits is poor, but this is not due to lack of funds, as the ESI has a huge surplus. This conversation is about how ESI must be saved, re-vitalized and expanded, as part of the struggle to achieve the right to healthcare and Health for All. And given some of the directions of reform that are being pushed, it it is also about how not to lose an asset that we never knew we had.
Resources for Health Systems Strengthening
Library of Case Studies
These case studies are intended to support the teaching of health systems and health policy as well as to help practitioners and policy makers with operational examples to assist in problem solving and policy formulation. The emphasis is on positive stories, but we include many with negative and mixed learnings as well. Case studies are very contextual and these are collected over a decade. Please keep this in mind when interpreting and using this material.
