Monitoring progress towards universal health coverage: recent developments

Abstract

The concept of universal health coverage (UHC) is now well established and understood as the aspiration that all people can obtain the quality health services they need without the risk of suffering financial hardship because of the need to pay out-of-pocket. Resolutions in the World Health Assembly (1,2), Regional Committees (3), and the UN General Assembly (4) have urged countries to develop their health and health financing systems to move closer to UHC. In the most recent World Health Assembly, another resolution argued that the principles of UHC should be included in the next set of sustainable development goals after 2015 (5). This increasing interest in UHC has resulted in more than 80 country requests to WHO for assistance on how to modify their health systems to move closer to UHC, and increasingly countries are also asking how best to track their progress. In response, WHO has developed jointly with the World Bank a measurement framework. It draws on many inputs including: five consultations with technical experts from academia, bilateral and multilateral organizations and countries; a consultation with civil society; more than 80 written submissions; and a set of country studies that identified what can and cannot be measured easily at country level.1 The resulting framework