THEMATIC AREA
Foundations of health in international cooperation
This section brings together the conceptual foundations of health, public health, global health, humanitarian health, and the ways of putting them into practice in international cooperation, along with some of their core pillars, such as primary health care, universal health coverage, and the social determinants of health.
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"Health" is probably the word that appears most often on this site. But it does not always mean the same thing. This page explores what health means from a biopsychosocial and rights-based perspective, and what public health is as an organised collective effort to protect and promote it.
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Global health is not the same as international health, tropical medicine or humanitarian health. This page untangles those concepts, traces their historical evolution and explains what sets humanitarian health apart as a field of action and as a sector within the humanitarian system.
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This page explains the three main approaches to international health cooperation: direct service delivery, support to essential services, and health system strengthening. Choosing the right approach for the context, or finding ways to make them coexist, is as important as the intervention itself.
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Universal health coverage means that all people have access to the quality health services they need, when and where they need them, without suffering financial hardship. This goal has now been adopted by countries and global health actors of all kinds in their policies and reforms.
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Primary health care has been as ambitious in its origins as it has been systematically reduced in its application. This page traces its history from the Alma Ata declaration, the challenges that have shaped it to this day, its relationship with universal health coverage and the enormous potential of one of its pillars: community health workers.
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A large part of health problems are caused by the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. Inequality in those conditions is the result of a toxic combination of poor social policies, unfair economic arrangements and poor political governance.
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