Health Systems

In November, the World Health Organization will select its next regional director for Africa. As we wrote in a previous blog, this position is not posted publicly and has no independent mechanism in place to recommend, interview, and evaluate the best qualified candidates.

Like others, we’ve written lots about Ebola over the past weeks: the insufficient funding and effort to the response in West Africa, the importance of well-qualified leadership at WHO, the role of health systems in disease response, the futility of travel bans, am...

Since the first case of Ebola appeared last year, the virus has infected nearly 10,000 people.  The epidemic is concentrated in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea — post-conflict countries with incredibly weak health systems.

Last week I participated in the launch of a new Lancet series on universal health coverage (UHC) in Latin America, which aims to showcase and contextualize how the UHC experience has played out to date in the region. 

The Ebola epidemic has made the entire world aware of the importance of hospitals within a health system and the dearth of hospitals altogether in the hardest-hit counties in West Africa.