Global health

The primary goal of the guideline is to improve the quality of care and the outcome in people with type 2 diabetes in low-resource settings. It recommends a set of basic interventions to integrate management of diabetes into primary health care. It will serve as basis for development of simple algorithms for use by health care staff in primary care in low-resource settings, to reduce the risk of acute and chronic complications of diabetes. The guideline was developed by a group of external and WHO experts, following the WHO process of guideline development. GRADE methodology was used to assess the quality of evidence and decide the strength of the recommendations.

The 2012 Progress Report on Committing to Child Survival: A Promise Renewed examines trends in child mortality estimates since 1990, and shows that major reductions have been made in under-five mortality rates in all regions and diverse countries. This has translated into a sharp drop in the estimated number of under-five deaths worldwide. Data released today by UNICEF and the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation show that the number of children under the age of five dying globally fell from nearly 12 million in 1990 to an estimated 6.9 million in 2011.

Health systems strengthening has become a top priority of many global and national health agendas as a way to improve health outcomes. With the global health context becoming increasingly complex, national health systems are beginning to move away from a focus on disease-specific health responses to comprehensive strengthening of health systems. The global community agrees that without a systems approach, population health outcomes will not further improve and health related development goals such as the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for 2015 will not be met.

Countdown launched its 2012 Report on June 14, 2012, at the Child Survival Call to Action, a two-day high-level meeting in Washington, D.C.  This conference, convened by the governments of the U.S., Ethiopia, and India in collaboration with UNICEF, charted a course toward the end of preventable child deaths around the world.

Health donors, policymakers, and practitioners continuously make life-and-death decisions about which type of patients receive what interventions, when, and at what cost. These decisions—as consequential as they are—often result from ad hoc, nontransparent processes driven more by inertia and interest groups than by science, ethics, and the public interest. The result is perverse priorities, wasted money, and needless death and illness. Examples abound: In India, only 44 percent of children 1 to 2 years old are fully vaccinated, yet open-heart surgery is subsidized in national public hospitals.

WHO Watch is pleased to present this report on the debates and decisions taken at the 65th World Health Assembly and 131st Executive Board meeting.

WHO Watch is a project of the People’s Health Movement, undertaken in association with a range of collaborating organisations (for further information about WHO Watch see www.ghwatch.org/who-watch). It is part of a broader initiative directed at democratising global health governance.

From 26-28 April 2012, EQUINET held a regional methods workshop in Cape Town, South Africa. It gathered the lead institutions of country teams in the Equity Watch work, the EQUINET steering committee, regional and international agencies and networks involved in work on health equity. The workshop aimed to: provide training on equity analysis and discuss future approaches to capacity building on equity analysis; review Equity Watch work at country level and the learning and implications from the work for future monitoring of health equity within countries; and review and discuss the draft regional Equity Watch and the follow up and dissemination.