The Global Health Agenda: Priorities, Challenges and Innovations

Global health concerns have quickly garnered the attention of governments, philanthropies, and policy makers like never before. The 2022 COVID-19 pandemic spurred discussions of collaboration intelligence as a means of optimizing disease surveillance systems and strengthening healthcare delivery systems.

Other global health priorities include meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), creating tuberculosis vaccines and drugs, combatting HIV infection and malaria parasites, managing antimicrobial resistance effectively and planning for pandemic outbreaks in the future.

1. Health Equity

The global health agenda encompasses two vital fields of action: managing interdependence and globalization; and addressing increasing disparities within nations through development strategies. This makes global health an especially sensitive issue; poor health affects everyone, with direct economic ramifications when governance failures arise - as evidenced by HIV/AIDS or disease outbreaks like SARS or H1N1.

PHO assists Member States in their pursuit of equitable health outcomes by working on issues related to gender and ethnicity; access to health services; measuring, monitoring and analyzing health inequalities; as well as creating resilient healthcare systems. 

PAHO plays a central role in this regard through its work on gender and ethnicity; access to healthcare; income; neighborhood characteristics, social inclusion; medical care provision etc. 

PAHO aids Member States by working on gender and ethnicity equality issues as well as measuring inequities through its work on right to health services; gender equity through its work related to gender; rights to health rights as social determinants of health determinants of health; measuring inequities over time as building resilient healthcare systems that serve communities. 

PAHO plays an instrumental role in this respect through its support for Member State efforts by working on gender and ethnicity equality issues related to rights to healthcare provision ; as well as building resilient healthcare systems capable of serving their populations by supporting states' efforts toward attaining equity by aiding Member State efforts towards attainment through work on gender and ethnicity related rights to healthcare rights for health as social determinants of health rights to healthcare provisioning rights to healthcare provisions by measuring, monitoring, analyzing health inequality over time and building resilient healthcare systems that work.

However, global work that prioritizes equity requires a shift in both mindset and approaches. To overcome health inequality and eradicate inequalities we must go beyond simply providing healthcare services to vulnerable populations; taking such an approach could result in a cycle of improvement where resources are targeted toward those most in need and then modified as results are evaluated.

No matter whether they work in business, community or academia, everyone must help promote equitable access to opportunities that enable all people to live healthy lives. Everyone can make a difference - either financially to support others' efforts or by volunteering their time and expertise towards making sure all individuals can access equal chances for good health - which is what health equity means: giving everyone equal chances at enjoying life fully to realize their full potential.

2. Social Determinants of Health

Although much of the global health agenda focuses on providing vaccines, drugs, diagnostics and treatments for emerging infections and pandemics, its success will ultimately depend on whether countries can build resilient healthcare systems that can withstand emerging infections and pandemics.

 While this applies across all low- and middle-income countries, high mortality regions face particular difficulty meeting global targets like Universal Health Coverage (UHC). Here funding needs may become particularly pressing.

Attaining UHC will require consideration of the social determinants of health (SDH) - factors like education, income, housing, environment and food security that have been shown to impact on overall health outcomes across the board. 

More research in health science and public health now takes an equity-centric approach that highlights how closely SDH links to inequities within health systems; this has resulted in multisectoral actions being necessary, intolerance of stark inequalities unacceptability as well as commitment towards realizing health as a human right.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the significance of adopting such an approach, with select national and local responses being widely recognized for balancing swiftly implemented social distancing measures with rigorous track, trace, isolate programs in tandem with supportive economic measures and community engagement/communication strategies. Unfortunately, however, such an approach can be challenging to implement when health systems are stretched thin.

Many claims are made about which health issues are "on or off the global health agenda," yet scholarship offers limited guidance as to how we should assess such claims systematically and fairly. Here, we employ a framework from sociology to understand how agenda status is determined in complex, multilateral arenas.

3. Health Systems

Even with an expanding arsenal of interventions and technologies designed to treat disease and prolong life, gaps in health outcomes remain. 

Their true power, however, cannot be realized unless countries possess robust health systems capable of harnessing their effectiveness; building up these systems must therefore form the cornerstone of domestic policies and financing; investing wisely in health services, infrastructure, workforces and medicines can support governments to realize universal health coverage (UHC) or health security goals.

Fragmented health systems prevent governments from meeting their universal healthcare and health security goals, with inequitable access to services, limited capacity to implement guidelines and low resilience during emergencies all contributing to fragmented systems that prevent governments from reaching their UHC and health security goals. It may also hinder translation of new knowledge into effective national policy and health systems.

Global health agendas increasingly demand a multidisciplinary approach that brings together ministries of health, foreign affairs, development and trade into an ongoing dialogue. Negotiating on such issues requires not only technical health knowledge but also an awareness of complex geopolitical constellations, alliances and trade/economic implications of different approaches taken towards global health challenges.

Due to its increasing complexity, global health landscape requires active engagement from civil society and private sectors in multilateral processes. 

Furthermore, engagement of local communities within international processes must also be prioritized in addition to developing new forms of collaboration among stakeholders at regional level - these efforts will promote mutually beneficial synergies among global health initiatives while simultaneously offering local participation opportunities and engagement platforms.

4. Climate Change

Global health agendas have focused for decades on combatting HIV, malaria and tuberculosis with vaccines; improving access to antiretrovirals; treating high mortality chronic diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes and amputations with treatment; developing vaccines against new infectious threats like Zika; but today there are challenges that threaten progress on both MDGs and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Climate change poses one of the greatest threats to public health today. Changes to our environment make it easier for mosquitos and other vectors of disease to move into new populations as populations expand, creating greater health risks due to difficult access to clean water and food supplies and flood-induced displacement that expose people to disease.

Another significant challenge lies in limited health funding both nationally and globally. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted serious gaps in global health funding as international donors and governments spent billions to deal with health emergencies resulting in depleting global health fund reserves, restricting effectiveness of vaccines and other lifesaving interventions.

Finaly, the global health agenda must move beyond an emphasis on infectious disease to encompass an all-inclusive and equitable approach that addresses social determinants of health as well as supporting MDGs that pertain to health. 

This may also involve tackling non-communicable diseases which often have an outsized effect in low-income countries despite being preventable; developing strategies which incorporate whole-of-government and whole-of-society interventions for reducing tobacco, alcohol, unhealthy diets and physical inactivity will be key components in meeting these new global health challenges; developing such integrated approaches will require leaders dedicated to working together on global health matters.

5. Innovation

Innovative thinking is at the core of global health's success, especially for countries whose low health spending makes reaching even basic goals challenging. Estimates put the current health financing gap in low-income countries at over 15% of GDPs (Hotez 2022). Expanding global investment pie requires innovative funding solutions that bring private capital together with public sector accountability.

One such approach is the Global Fund to End AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria's increased investments in low-income countries to assist them in meeting MDG targets for these diseases. Another is Tsinghua University and Beijing Municipal Government's Global Health Drug Discovery Institute which seeks molecular breakthroughs for infectious diseases that disproportionately afflict developing nations - tuberculosis, malaria and neglected tropical diseases (NTDs).

Vaccines are another crucial innovation. Yet accessing life-saving vaccines, tests and treatments remains a significant challenge; COVID-19 highlighted this need by emphasizing its prevalence in Africa - calling attention to a more global strategy to get effective tools into those who most require them.

The Global Health Security Agenda was devised as a response to an interconnected and globalized world where health threats can spread more quickly and unpredictably than ever. CDC is working with 31 countries toward reaching the GHSA's aim of strengthening national capacities for detecting, preventing, and responding to infectious disease threats.

The global health agenda encompasses two critical action spheres: managing interdependence and globalization through development strategies; and addressing growing inequalities within and between nations using development strategies. Therefore, its dynamics have an immediate and significant impact on all of us as individuals and our livelihoods.