health for all

“While Kenya has seen improvements in areas like HIV care and treatment and child survival, many Kenyans still struggle to access basic healthcare,” says Dr. Jonathan D. Quick, President and CEO of Management Sciences for Health (MSH), in an op-ed published today in The People, a Kenyan newspaper.

Quick returned to the country to speak at Kenya’s launch of the Health for All: Campaign for Universal Health Coverage in Africa (Health for All) last month.

In the op-ed, Quick highlights the country’s progress toward universal health coverage (UHC) and the role of Health for All:

The campaign’s role is to help build awareness at national and county levels about the importance of expanding access to healthcare, and to ensure that issues like infrastructure, health workers, and financing receive adequate attention in the planning process.

This post is part of our Global Health Impact series on the 67th World Health Assembly (#WHA67" href="http://www.msh.org/blog-tags/wha67">WHA67), held in Geneva, May 18-24, 2014. This year, MSH co-hosted three side events focusing on the role of universal health coverage (May 20), chronic diseases (May 20), and governance for health (May 21) in the post-2015 framework. Six MSH representatives attended WHA as part of the 60-plus-person Global Health Council (GHC) delegation.

The Millennium Development Goals, due to expire next year, have defined an era of global health. Since their adoption in 2000, the global AIDS response has scaled up massively; childhood immunization has become the norm in most settings; and many more women can access the family planning and reproductive healthcare they need. The MDGs coincided with, and perhaps helped to usher, a “Golden Age” of global health funding, which supported hard work and innovation that saved millions of lives.

The Health for All: Campaign for Universal Health Coverage is working to ensure that challenges that hinder access to quality health care in Kenya are addressed. The campaign aims to ensure that governments and stakeholders in health services delivery prioritize strengthening infrastructure, human resource for health, and health care financing to improve service delivery.

The campaign will official launch on April 28, 2014 with the theme, "Health systems strengthening for universal health coverage".

In preparation for this launch, the campaign team has recruited a Technical Working Group to spearhead the campaign. At the first meeting on January 21, 2014, the team identified the health systems strengthening theme and three sub themes for the campaign: strengthening infrastructure, human resource for health, and health care financing.

Campaign partners at the messaging workshop in Kenya.Photo credit: MSH