Workshop on Maximizing Synergies between Global Health Initiatives and Health Systems
Summary
A Workshop on Maximizing Synergies between Global Health Initiatives and Health Systems was held in Lipa City in the Philippines from 25 to 28 November 2009. The workshop was co-organized by the WHO Regional Offices of South-East Asia and the Western Pacific to address the issue of global health initiatives (GHIs) and health systems. The workshop provided an opportunity to bring together 109 participants – Member State technical staff from disease-specific programmes as well as policy and planning departments along with WHO country office staff from disease-control and health systems disciplines. Observers included representatives of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), International Medical Center of Japan (IMCJ), United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), World Bank, Asian Development Bank (ADB), Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS-Technical Support Facility (UNAIDS-TSF) for Asia and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC).
The objectives of the workshop were:
(1) the participants will have shared the lessons learnt from the specific country analyses of bottlenecks and how they are translated in grant proposals;
(2) the country teams will have analysed the specific health systems bottlenecks to scaling up or implementing EPI, malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS programmes in their setting using a building block framework by reviewing current proposals and reports; and
(3) the country teams will have prepared concrete bullet points of potentially synergistic health systems interventions that could address bottlenecks, improve efficiency or enhance sustainability of disease control interventions across programmes to be used for funding applications.