400m lack access to essential health services — WHO

By Sola Ogundipe
AN estimated 400 million persons across the world do not have access to basic but essential health care services including family planning, antenatal care, skilled birth attendance, child immunisation, antiretroviral therapy, tuberculosis treatment, and access to clean water and sanitisation, among others.


Pregnant women in low-income countries lack access to family planning, antenatal care and skilled birth attendance, amongst others.
Disclosing this in a new report, released weekend, the World Health Organisation, WHO, and World Bank Group rsaid an estimated 6 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are pushed further into extreme poverty because of health spending.
Entitled: “Tracking Universal Health Coverage”, the report is the first of its kind to measure health service coverage and financial protection to assess countries’ progress towards universal health coverage.
It looked at global access to essential health services in 2013, and found that at least 400 million people lacked access to at least one essential health service.
The report also found that, across 37 countries, six percent of the population was tipped or pushed further into extreme poverty ($1.25/day) because they had to pay for health services out of their own pockets. When the study factored in a poverty measure of $2/day, 17 percent of people in these countries were impoverished, or further impoverished, by health expenses.
In a reaction, Senior Director of Health, Nutrition and Population at the World Bank Group, Dr. Tim Evans stated: “This report is a wakeup call. It shows that we’re a long way from achieving universal health coverage. We must expand access to health and protect the poorest from health expenses that are causing them severe financial hardship.”
Also speaking, Assistant Director-General, Health Systems and Innovation, at the WHO, Dr Marie-Paule Kieny, said “The world’s most disadvantaged people are missing out on even the most basic services. A commitment to equity is at the heart of universal health coverage. Health policies and programmes should focus on providing quality health services for the poorest people, women and children, people living in rural areas and those from minority groups,” she noted.
According to the Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at the World Bank Group, Dr Kaushik Basu, “These high levels of impoverishment, which happen when poor people have to pay out of pocket for their own emergency health care, pose a major threat to the goal of eliminating extreme poverty.
“As we transition to a post-2015 development era, we must act on these findings, or the world’s poor risk being left behind,” he argued.
Also speaking, Director of the Department of Health Statistics and Information Systems at the WHO, Dr Ties Boerma, opined that as more countries make commitments to universal health coverage, one of the major challenges they face is how to track progress.
“The report shows that it is possible to quantify universal health coverage and track progress towards its key goals, both in terms of health services and financial protection coverage, she said.”
WHO and the World Bank Group recommend that countries pursuing universal health coverage should aim to achieve a minimum of 80 percent population coverage of essential health services, and that everyone everywhere should be protected from catastrophic and impoverishing health payments.
This is the first in a series of annual reports that WHO and the World Bank Group will produce on tracking progress towards UHC across countries. In his view, Managing Director at The Rockefeller Foundation, Michael Myers, said, as the saying goes, ‘what gets measured, gets done.
“”With countries around the world taking steps to provide universal health coverage, the ability to identify gaps and effectively measure progress will add critical momentum to this global movement. “This an important tool for countries to achieve universal health coverage and build more resilient health systems.”