'It's far too complicated': why fragmentation persists in global health.

BACKGROUND: Despite many efforts to achieve better coordination, fragmentation is an enduring feature of the global health landscape that undermines the effectiveness of health programmes and threatens the attainment of the health-related Sustainable Development Goals. In this paper we identify and describe the multiple causes of fragmentation in development assistant for health at the global level. The study is of particular relevance since the emergence of new global health problems such as COVID-19 heightens the need for global health actors to work in coordinated ways. Our study is part of the Lancet Commission on Synergies between Universal Health Coverage, Health Security and Health Promotion. METHODS: We used a mixed methods approach. This consisted of a non-systematic literature review of published papers in scientific journals, reports, books and websites. We also carried out twenty semi-structured expert interviews with individuals from bilateral and multilateral organisations, governments and academic and research institutions between April 2019 and December 2019. RESULTS: We identified five distinct yet interconnected sets of factors causing fragmentation: proliferation of global health actors; problems of global leadership; divergent interests; problems of accountability; problems of power relations. We explain why global health actors struggle to harmonise their approaches and priorities, fail to align their work with low- and middle-income countries' needs and why they continue to embrace funding instruments that create fragmentation. CONCLUSIONS: Many global actors are genuinely committed to addressing the problems of fragmentation, despite their complexity and interconnected nature. This paper aims to raise awareness and understanding of the causes of fragmentation and to help guide actors' efforts in addressing the problems and moving to more synergistic approaches.

Building the case for embedding global health security into universal health coverage: a proposal for a unified health system that includes public health.

In the wake of the recent west African Ebola epidemic, there is global consensus on the need for strong health systems; however, agreement is less apparent on effective mechanisms for establishing and maintaining these systems, particularly in resource-constrained settings and in the presence of multiple and sustained stresses (eg, conflict, famine, climate change, and globalisation). The construction of the International Health Regulations (2005) guidelines and the WHO health systems framework, has resulted in the separation of public health functions and health-care services, which are interdependent in actuality and must be integrated to ensure a continuous, unbroken national health system. By analysing efforts to strengthen health systems towards attaining universal health coverage and investments to improve global health security, we examine areas of overlap and offer recommendations for construction of a unified national health system that includes public health. One way towards achieving universal health coverage is to broaden the definition of a health system.

The global fight against trans-fat: the potential role of international trade and law.

Non-communicable diseases in general and cardiovascular diseases in particular are a leading cause of death globally. Trans-fat consumption is a significant risk factor for cardiovascular diseases. The World Health Organization's 'REPLACE' action package of 2018 aims to eliminate it completely in the global food supply by 2023. Legislative and other regulatory actions (i.e., banning trans-fat) are considered as effective means to achieve such a goal. Both wealthier and poorer countries are taking or considering action, as shown by the United States food regulations and Cambodian draft food legislation discussed in this paper. This paper reviews these actions and examines public and private stakeholders' incentives to increase health-protecting or health-promoting standards and regulations at home and abroad, setting the ground for further research on the topic. It focuses on the potential of trade incentives as a potential driver of a 'race to the top'. While it has been documented that powerful countries use international trade instruments to weaken other countries' national regulations, at times these powerful countries may also be interested in more stringent regulations abroad to protect their exports from competition from third countries with less stringent regulations. This article explores practical and principled considerations on how such a dynamic may spread trans-fat restrictions globally. It argues that trade dynamics and public health considerations within powerful countries may help to promote anti-trans-fat regulation globally but will not be sufficient and is ethically questionable. True international regulatory cooperation is needed and could be facilitated by the World Health Organization. Nevertheless, the paper highlights that international trade and investment law offers opportunities for anti-trans-fat policy diffusion globally.

The integration of the global HIV/AIDS response into universal health coverage: desirable, perhaps possible, but far from easy.

BACKGROUND: The international community's health focus is shifting from achieving disease-specific targets towards aiming for universal health coverage. Integrating the global HIV/AIDS response into universal health coverage may be inevitable to secure its achievements in the long run, and for expanding these achievements beyond addressing a single disease. However, this integration comes at a time when international financial support for the global HIV/AIDS response is declining, while political support for universal health coverage is not translated into financial support. To assess the risks, challenges and opportunities of the integration of the global HIV/AIDS response into national universal health coverage plans, we carried out assessments in Indonesia, Kenya, Uganda and Ukraine, based on key informant interviews with civil society, policy-makers and development partners, as well as on a review of grey and academic literature. RESULTS: In the absence of international financial support, governments are turning towards national health insurance schemes to finance universal health coverage, making access to healthcare contingent on regular financial contributions. It is not clear how AIDS treatment will be fit in. While the global HIV/AIDS response accords special attention to exclusion due to sexual orientation and gender identity, sex work or drug use, efforts to achieve universal health coverage focus on exclusion due to poverty, gender and geographical inequalities. Policies aiming for universal health coverage try to include private healthcare providers in the health system, which could create a sustainable framework for civil society organisations providing HIV/AIDS-related services. While the global HIV/AIDS response insisted on the inclusion of civil society in decision-making policies, that is not (yet) the case for policies aiming for universal health coverage. DISCUSSION: While there are many obstacles to successful integration of the global HIV/AIDS response into universal health coverage policies, integration seems inevitable and is happening. Successful integration will require expanding the principle of 'shared responsibility' which emerged with the global HIV/AIDS response to universal health coverage, rather than relying solely on domestic efforts for universal health coverage. The preference for national health insurance as the best way to achieve universal health coverage should be reconsidered. An alliance between HIV/AIDS advocates and proponents of universal health coverage requires mutual condemnation of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, sex work or drug use, as well as addressing of exclusion based on poverty and other factors. The fulfilment of the promise to include civil society in decision-making processes about universal health coverage is long overdue.

Correspondence regarding 'Assefa Y, et al., BMC Health Services Research. 2011; 11 (1):81 and 2014; 14(1):45': The Positive-Deviance approach for translating evidence into practice to improve patient retention in HIV care.

The purpose of this correspondence is to describe how the positive-deviance approach can be used to translate evidence into practice, based on successive studies conducted in Ethiopia. In earlier studies, it was identified that retention in antiretroviral treatment care was variable across health facilities; and, seeking compliance across facilities, a framework was developed based on the practices of those positive-deviant health facilities, where performance was noted to be markedly better. It was found that the positive deviance approach was effective in facilitating the transfer of innovative practices (using different mechanisms) from positive-deviant health facilities to negative-deviant health facilities. As a result, the variability in retention in care across health facilities narrowed over time, increasing from 83 to 96% in 2007/8 to 95-97% in 2013/14. In conclusion, the positive-deviance approach is a valuable tool to translate evidence into practice, spread good practices, and help achieving universal health coverage.

Global constitutionalism, applied to global health governance: uncovering legitimacy deficits and suggesting remedies.

BACKGROUND: Global constitutionalism is a way of looking at the world, at global rules and how they are made, as if there was a global constitution, empowering global institutions to act as a global government, setting rules which bind all states and people. ANALYSIS: This essay employs global constitutionalism to examine how and why global health governance, as currently structured, has struggled to advance the right to health, a fundamental human rights obligation enshrined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. It first examines the core structure of the global health governance architecture, and its evolution since the Second World War. Second, it identifies the main constitutionalist principles that are relevant for a global constitutionalism assessment of the core structure of the global health governance architecture. Finally, it applies these constitutionalist principles to assess the core structure of the global health governance architecture. DISCUSSION: Leading global health institutions are structurally skewed to preserve high incomes countries' disproportionate influence on transnational rule-making authority, and tend to prioritise infectious disease control over the comprehensive realisation of the right to health. CONCLUSION: A Framework Convention on Global Health could create a classic division of powers in global health governance, with WHO as the law-making power in global health governance, a global fund for health as the executive power, and the International Court of Justice as the judiciary power.

Cautionary Notes on a Global Tiered Pricing Framework for Medicines.

Recently, there has been a policy momentum toward creating a global tiered pricing framework, which would provide differentiated prices for medicines globally, based on each country's capacity to pay. We studied the most influential proposals for a tiered pricing framework since the 1995 World Trade Organization's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. We synthesized 6 critical questions to be addressed for a global framework to function and explored the many challenges of implementation. Although we acknowledge that there is the potential for an exceptional global commitment that would benefit both producers and those in developing countries in need of wider access to medicines, our greatest concern is to ensure that a global framework does not price out the poor from pharmaceutical markets nor threaten current flexibilities within the international patent regime.

"Everywhere but not specifically somewhere": a qualitative study on why the right to health is not explicit in the post-2015 negotiations.

BACKGROUND: The Millennium Development Goals expire at the end of 2015 and global negotiations are underway to finalise the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Much activism has occurred encouraging a post-2015 health and development goal embedded in the highest attainable standard of health ('right to health'). Despite this, the right to health was absent in three key post-2015 intergovernmental Sustainable Development Goal proposals in 2014, one of which was reinforced by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2014 as the guiding document for ongoing interstate negotiations. This article examines why it appears the right to health, so far, is not gaining direct expression in post-2015 discussion. METHODS: This qualitative research is part of a broader study using thematic and discourse analysis examining the high-level policy debate on health goals in the discourse of the formulation of the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Key-informant interviews were conducted in two interview rounds in 2013 and 2014, with participants from multilateral and other organisations (government, academia, civil society and philanthropy) responsible for health in the post-2015 development agenda (or the post-2015 development agenda more broadly). This study synthesises data from both interview rounds on Health and Human Rights in post-2015 Sustainable Development Goal negotiations. RESULTS: Six reasons why the right to health may not have gained effective traction in the unfolding post-2015 Member State negotiations were found. The first three reasons relate to broader issues surrounding human rights' (including sexual and reproductive health and rights) positioning within international relations discourse, and the second three relate to the challenges of transforming the human right to health into a practically applied post-2015 health goal. CONCLUSIONS: This paper reports the views of participants, many of who sit at the interface of United Nations and Member State negotiations, on the right to health's location (and projected trajectory) at two temporal junctions in evolving post-2015 negotiations. The interviews provide insight into high-level hesitancy that the right to health be expressly incorporated in the final post-2015 health and development goal, as well as documents participants' doubt that rights language will explicitly frame the broader Sustainable Development Goals, their targets and indicators.

From conceptual pluralism to practical agreement on policy: global responsibility for global health.

BACKGROUND: As the human cost of the global economic crisis becomes apparent the ongoing discussions surrounding the post-2015 global development framework continue at a frenzied pace. Given the scale and scope of increased globalization moving forward in a post-Millennium Development Goals era, to protect and realize health equity for all people, has never been more challenging or more important. The unprecedented nature of global interdependence underscores the importance of proposing policy solutions that advance realizing global responsibility for global health. DISCUSSION: This article argues for advancing global responsibility for global health through the creation of a Global Fund for Health. It suggests harnessing the power of the exceptional response to the combined epidemics of AIDS, TB and Malaria, embodied in the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, to realize an expanded, reconceptualized Global Fund for Health. However this proposal creates both an analytical quandary embedded in conceptual pluralism and a practical dilemma for the scope and raison d'etre of a new Global Fund for Health. To address these issues we offer a logical framework for moving from conceptual pluralism in the theories supporting global responsibility for health to practical agreement on policy to realize this end. We examine how the innovations flowing from this exceptional response can be coupled with recent ideas and concepts, for example a global social protection floor, a Global Health Constitution or a Framework Convention for Global Health, that share the global responsibility logic that underpins a Global Fund for Health. CONCLUSIONS: The 2014 Lancet Commission on Global Governance for Health Report asks whether a single global health protection fund would be better for global health than the current patchwork of global and national social transfers. We concur with this suggestion and argue that there is much room for practical agreement on a Global Fund for Health that moves from the conceptual level into policies and practice that advance global health. The issues of shared responsibility and mutual accountability feature widely in the post-2015 discussions and need to be addressed in a coherent manner. Our article argues why and how a Global Fund for Health effectuates this, thus advancing global responsibility for global health.

Universal Health Coverage and the Right to Health: From Legal Principle to Post-2015 Indicators.

Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is widely considered one of the key components for the post-2015 health goal. The idea of UHC is rooted in the right to health, set out in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Based on the Covenant and the General Comment of the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which is responsible for interpreting and monitoring the Covenant, we identify 6 key legal principles that should underpin UHC based on the right to health: minimum core obligation, progressive realization, cost-effectiveness, shared responsibility, participatory decision making, and prioritizing vulnerable or marginalized groups. Yet, although these principles are widely accepted, they are criticized for not being specific enough to operationalize as post-2015 indicators for reaching the target of UHC. In this article, we propose measurable and achievable indicators for UHC based on the right to health that can be used to inform the ongoing negotiations on Sustainable Development Goals. However, we identify 3 major challenges that face any exercise in setting indicators post-2015: data availability as an essential criterion, the universality of targets, and the adaptation of global goals to local populations.

Global constitutionalism, responsibility to protect, and extra-territorial obligations to realize the right to health: time to overcome the double standard (once again).

If human rights are "inalienable rights of all members of the human family", as is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, then no government should be allowed to deny people of them. When some governments fail to realize them for the people under their jurisdiction, the international community has a responsibility to step in. This extra-territorial effect of human rights was not included in the original conception of human rights. It is of recent date, and, in practice, limited to interventions to end severe violations of civil and political human rights. For economic, social and cultural human rights, extra-territorial obligations are still contested. In this paper, we elaborate three contentions: first, that the realization of social human rights requires the acceptance of and compliance with extra-territorial obligations; second, that compliance with extra-territorial obligations would help transform the international assistance paradigm from charity into legal obligation; and third, that for global constitutionalism to succeed in improving the fairness of the international legal order requires acceptance of the indivisibility of human rights.

How can health remain central post-2015 in a sustainable development paradigm?

In two years, the uncompleted tasks of the Millennium Development Goals will be merged with the agenda articulated in the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. This process will seek to integrate economic development (including the elimination of extreme poverty), social inclusion, environmental sustainability, and good governance into a combined sustainable development agenda. The first phase of consultation for the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals reached completion in the May 2013 report to the Secretary-General of the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. Health did well out of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) process, but the global context and framing of the new agenda is substantially different, and health advocates cannot automatically assume the same prominence. This paper argues that to remain central to continuing negotiations and the future implementation, four strategic shifts are urgently required. Advocates need to reframe health from the poverty reduction focus of the MDGs to embrace the social sustainability paradigm that underpins the new goals. Second, health advocates need to speak--and listen--to the whole sustainable development agenda, and assert health in every theme and every relevant policy, something that is not yet happening in current thematic debates. Third, we need to construct goals that will be truly "universal", that will engage every nation--a significant re-orientation from the focus on low-income countries of the MDGs. And finally, health advocates need to overtly explore what global governance structures will be needed to finance and implement these universal Sustainable Development Goals.

Beyond health aid: would an international equalization scheme for universal health coverage serve the international collective interest?

It has been argued that the international community is moving 'beyond aid'. International co-financing in the international collective interest is expected to replace altruistically motivated foreign aid. The World Health Organization promotes 'universal health coverage' as the overarching health goal for the next phase of the Millennium Development Goals. In order to provide a basic level of health care coverage, at least some countries will need foreign aid for decades to come. If international co-financing of global public goods is replacing foreign aid, is universal health coverage a hopeless endeavor? Or would universal health coverage somehow serve the international collective interest?Using the Sustainable Development Solutions Network proposal to finance universal health coverage as a test case, we examined the hypothesis that national social policies face the threat of a 'race to the bottom' due to global economic integration and that this threat could be mitigated through international social protection policies that include international cross-subsidies - a kind of 'equalization' at the international level.The evidence for the race to the bottom theory is inconclusive. We seem to be witnessing a 'convergence to the middle'. However, the 'middle' where 'convergence' of national social policies is likely to occur may not be high enough to keep income inequality in check.The implementation of the international equalization scheme proposed by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network would allow to ensure universal health coverage at a cost of US$55 in low income countries-the minimum cost estimated by the World Health Organization. The domestic efforts expected from low and middle countries are far more substantial than the international co-financing efforts expected from high income countries. This would contribute to 'convergence' of national social policies at a higher level. We therefore submit that the proposed international equalization scheme should not be considered as foreign aid, but rather as an international collective effort to protect and promote national social policy in times of global economic integration: thus serving the international collective interest.