Health is integral to sustainable global development, as ensuring the health and well-being of all contributes to economic growth and the prosperity of nations and is thus key to poverty reduction. Spurred in a large part by the push for the millennium development goals (MDGs), global health has improved significantly in the last few decades. Despite these efforts, millions of people around the world still do not have access to quality and affordable healthcare, and as a result, many are impoverished due to high out-of-pocket health expenditures and die from preventable causes.
There is an urgent need to increase investments in health, to ensure that all people have access to the health care they need without suffering financial hardship. However, rich and poor countries alike face resource constraints that inhibit their health systems from meeting the ever-increasing demand for healthcare. The scale of the challenge to meet global health is compounded by climate change, which exacerbates existing health threats and creates new public health emergencies. The COVID-19 pandemic caused severe economic and fiscal shocks, and showed that more needs to be done to ensure global sustainable growth and well-being.
The Centre for Global Health (CGH) acknowledges the need for countries to make tough choices about how to invest in health, in order to sustainably provide healthcare for all.
The CGH will use health economics as a crosscutting theme to:
- advance education and learning in health economics and priority setting,
- build networks and partnerships accelerating decision support in healthcare,
- increase knowledge and advance best practices in health economics and priority setting,
- facilitate access to evidence-to-decision tools and global public goods to enhance health policy and decision-making.
Leader
Associate Professor - Department of Health Management and Health Economics, University of Oslo