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Background
Global Health has increasingly gained international visibility and prominence. First and foremost, the spread of cross-border infectious disease arouses a great deal of media and public interest, just as it drives research priorities of faculty and academic programmes. At the same time, Global Health has become a major area of philanthropic action. Despite the importance it has acquired over the last two decades, the complex collective term “Global Health” still lacks a uniform use today.
Objectives
The objective of this paper is to present the existing definitions of Global Health, and analyse their meaning and implications. The paper emphasises that the term “Global Health” goes beyond the territorial meaning of “global”, connects local and global, and refers to an explicitly political concept. Global Health regards health as a rights-based, universal good; it takes into account social inequalities, power asymmetries, the uneven distribution of resources and governance challenges. Thus, it represents the necessary continuance of Public Health in the face of diverse and ubiquitous global challenges. A growing number of international players, however, focus on public-private partnerships and privatisation and tend to promote biomedical reductionism through predominantly technological solutions. Moreover, the predominant Global Health concept reflects the inherited hegemony of the Global North. It takes insufficient account of the global burden of disease, which is mainly characterised by non-communicable conditions, and the underlying social determinants of health.
Conclusions
Beyond resilience and epidemiological preparedness for preventing cross-border disease threats, Global Health must focus on the social, economic and political determinants of health. Biomedical and technocratic reductionism might be justified in times of acute health crises but entails the risk of selective access to health care. Consistent health-in-all policies are required for ensuring Health for All and sustainably reducing health inequalities within and among countries. Global Health must first and foremost pursue the enforcement of the universal right to health and contribute to overcoming global hegemony.
- To strengthen its expanding role in global health, the German government is currently preparing a new global health strategy, to be published in 2019.
- As social, political and economic determinants are highly relevant for population health, the German government will need to increase coherence in order to promote its emphasis on creating equal opportunities and reducing inequalities in and between countries.
- For further strengthening its commitment to universal health coverage, for promoting decent work and healthy labour conditions, and for enforcing the right to health, the German government will have to stress the mandatory role of the public sector for global health
Good governance and redistribution in health financing : Pro-poor effects and general challenges
(2017)
Good governance has increasingly attained priority in international cooperation and health-system performance. Governance refers to all steering activities by public entities to influence the behaviour and activities of stakeholders involved. In the health sector, governance refers to a wide range of functions related to guidance and rule-making carried out by governments or other public decision-makers. More specifically, governance in the health-financing system applies to two different aspects: in addition to the approaches, strategies and policies determining how financial flows are implemented, managed and supervised according to rules- or outcome-based indicators, health-financing governance encompasses the question of how far resource generation, pooling and allocation are organised in an equitable, fair and sustainable manner. Individual and collective financial sustainability, burden sharing and social coherence or solidarity are essential parts of health-financing governance and depend deeply on societal priorities and values. Fairness of financing, transparent risk pooling and accountable purchasing of health services are intrinsic elements of governance in health financing and critical for achieving universal health coverage. The government is ultimately responsible for implementing an appropriate framework for a transparent, accountable and reliable health-financing system, for ensuring that the intermediate institutions can perform their functions, for executing effective and powerful supervision, and for providing civil society with the means to demand transparency and good financial governance.
Health-financing indicators show the system’s ability to effectively mobilise and allocate resources, implement social protection and pooling schemes, and distribute the financial burden of care equitably. Essentially two groups of indicators exist for assessing governance in the health financing system: rules-based approaches consider the existence of appropriate policies, strategies, and codified approaches for governance; outcome-based indicators measure whether rules and procedures are effectively implemented or enforced and health-financing targets achieved.