20.02.2019

New WHO report

Public Spending on Health: A Closer Look at Global Trends

World Health Organisation (WHO) "Three years after the international community adopted the Sustainable Development Goals at the 2015 UN General Assembly, the global health landscape has been transformed. In the journey towards realizing the ambitious goal of universal health coverage, more countries are expanding benefits, creating institutional arrangements and allocating public funds to expand health services coverage.

Countries from all regions and at all levels of income are implementing health financing reforms to expand coverage. (...) This report also presents, for the first time, spending on primary health care and specific diseases and looks closely at the relationship between spending and service coverage." (Photo: United Nations Photo/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The report’s key messages include:

  • Global trends in health spending confirm the transformation of the world’s funding of health services.
  • Domestic spending on health is central to universal health coverage, but there is no clear trend of increased government priority for health.
  • Primary health care is a priority for expenditure tracking.
  • Allocations across disease and interventions differ between external and government sources and
  • Performance of government spending on health can improve.