Implementing, improving and learning: cross-country lessons learned from the African Health Initiative

Excerpt

Effective health systems strengthening interventions that are able to improve primary health care and generate replicable knowledge to accelerate change are widely recognized as critical to achieving quality universal health coverage. The Ebola outbreak further highlighted the need for effective and resilient primary health care systems that are able to deliver quality services at the local and subnational levels [1]. In parallel, there has been growing recognition that even when effective interventions are discovered, there is a large gap between knowing what works and knowing how to make it work in the real world and in diverse settings [2, 3]. There has also been a recognition of the central role of high quality and people-centered primary health care delivery in determining whether countries have been able to meet the health-related Millennium Development Goals. Ensuring quality primary health care delivery continues to play a central role in efforts to achieve the effective Universal Health Care coverage needed to reach health-related Sustainable Development Goals. …