Fast track — Public HealthAdvancement of global health: key messages from the Disease Control Priorities Project
Section snippets
Intervention priorities
DCP2 identifies highly cost-effective opportunities to improve health that policymakers are ignoring or underfunding and details prevalent investments that are not cost effective. The perspective taken is that of allocation of public finances to meet social goals of improving population health and reducing financial risks of ill-health. Careful selection of priorities makes limited resources go further and encourages aid agencies and development partners to invest in the expansion of health
Delivering interventions
Interventions are rarely freestanding, but are delivered through a service infrastructure. Community health status is correlated with the quality of health-service facilities, which can be enhanced even in resource-constrained settings, with greatest potential for improving quality at low cost. Intervention and service quality greatly affect cost-effectiveness, and improving quality can be an efficient use of resources. Improvement of the quality of care of acute respiratory infections through
Strengthening health systems
Cost-effectiveness data for interventions and packages indicate what a reasonably well functioning health system can achieve. They represent potential cost-effectiveness and need to be supplemented with evidence and guidance on how health systems can provide interventions effectively, efficiently, and equitably. Although we have dealt mainly with the chapters in DCP2 that deal with intervention selection, one of the chapters in the book provides a more extended summary of findings concerning
Conclusion
Improvements made to health constitute an enormous success for human welfare in the 20th century. Four important challenges face the world, however, at the dawn of the 21st century: high levels and rapid growth of non-communicable conditions in developing countries; the unchecked HIV/AIDS pandemic; the possibility of a successor to the influenza pandemic of 1918; and the persistence in many countries and population subgroups of high but preventable levels of mortality and disability from
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