Improved access to quality essential health services irrespective of gender, age or disability

The Secretariat will step up its leadership by: providing global, regional and national stewardship to support countries most in need in reorienting their health systems towards primary health care, including essential public health functions central to regaining universal health coverage and other health-related Sustainable Development Goals and supporting the attainment of health security. This is in line with the recommendations of the WHO position paper on building health systems resilience for universal health coverage and health security during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond; and provide leadership at global, regional and national level for ensuring development and implementation of policies and practices that are aimed at elimination of avoidable harm in health care and improving safety and quality of care. This is in line with the strategic objectives and strategies of the Global patient safety action plan 2021-2030. The Secretariat will support countries to: prioritize services through context-relevant service packages that are designed for implementation and reflect models of care that are primary health care-oriented; establish service and infrastructure development plans, ensuring foundations are met and that provision of quality primary care services is scaled up; develop and implement national policies, standards and mechanisms for quality and safety, including IPC programmes and practices and mechanisms to reduce medical errors and associated harms and enhance medication safety, in both public and private health facilities; organize and manage service delivery platforms and how they relate with each other, including through strengthened leadership and management capacity at the subnational (i.e. district) and facility levels and improved transparency and accountability locally; design mechanisms to facilitate access to care and patients? movements across service delivery platforms (self-care, home care, community health centres, general and specialized hospitals in both public and private sectors), with the definition care pathways and by bolstering opportunities for digital and organizational innovations; advocate, build capacity and support empowering and engaging patients, families and communities, as core elements of efforts to the reorientation of health systems, and improve quality and patient safety, recognizing and integrating behavioural insights into policies; implement clinical support tools to standardize and improve service delivery at the point of care, including for traditional and complementary medicine; and continuously track progress services and learn for improvement, including by implementing the primary health care monitoring and evaluation framework, with particular emphasis on equity issues and reaching the most vulnerable.