The Evolution of World Bank Engagement in Health
Why Focus on Health Services?
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Providing health services is the most visible function of any health system to both users and the public. These include services dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of disease or the promotion, maintenance, and restoration of health. Service provision refers to the way in which inputs such as money, staff, equipment, and drugs are combined to allow the delivery of health interventions.
Improving access, coverage, and quality of services depends on these inputs being available, on the ways services are organized and managed, and on incentives influencing providers and users. It is recognized that it takes more than health services to improve health, nutrition, and population outcomes. A range of personal, social, economic, and environmental factors are known to influence health. This evaluation focuses primarily on health services rather than on broader health, nutrition, and population outcomes.
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The key drivers of universal health coverage have been articulated in the World Bank Group’s strategic focus in the health sector for about two decades (see figure below).
The 1997 Health, Nutrition, and Population (HNP) sector strategy steered the World Bank toward improving outcomes for the poor, protecting the population from the impoverishing effects of illness, enhancing the performance of health systems, and securing sustainable health financing.
Millennium Development Goals put health at the center of the development community’s agenda.
Since the 2007 health strategy, World Bank Group support to health services has focused more on results while sustaining its emphasis on the needs of the poor, health systems performance, and sustainable health financing.
The World Bank Group’s 2013 corporate strategy acknowledges the importance of health services to achieve the twin goals of ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity, and emphasizes the “One World Bank Group” approach to find the best development solutions, regardless of whether they are public or private. By fostering synergies among World Bank Group institutions, this Joint Approach highlights World Bank Group’s unique role in helping client countries in achieving universal health coverage by harnessing the private sector.
The Health, Nutrition and Population (HNP) Global Practice (GP), created in 2014, adopted the mission of better connecting global and local expertise within the World Bank Group to assist client countries in accelerating progress toward universal health coverage through financial protection, service coverage, and healthy societies.
In 2014, the World Bank joined a global coalition of more than 500 leading health and development organizations that called for acceleration in universal health coverage to ensure everyone, everywhere, can access quality health services when needed without being forced into poverty.
The 2015 United Nations General Assembly embraced universal health coverage among the targets for the Sustainable Development Goal number 3 (SDG3): “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.”
The World Bank Group Human Capital project—the focus of the World Bank Group president’s speech at the 2017 annual meetings—confirms the central role that health will continue to play in the World Bank Group’s strategic focus.
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