Inside the mind of Tedros | 10 Key Points

Inside the mind of Tedros

Since taking charge of WHO in July 2017, Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has sought to transform the organization. Tedros (as he likes to be known) has focused WHO on health equity, confronting new threats, and emergency preparedness and response. Read this Q&A Tedros had with David Peters, chair of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is a longtime health systems researcher and a WHO adviser.

We summarise 10 key points of particular interest to us at Children for Health and to our community.

1. More focused on outcomes rather than simply outputs. WHO is known for the quality of its normative work, but there’s little value in publishing a guideline if nobody uses it.
2. Much greater emphasis on making sure our world-class technical work is used at country level and much greater focus on measuring the impact of that work.
3. Ensuring that 150 country offices have the resources they need to deliver impact.
4. Engaging with partners proactively to harness everyone’s collective strength.
5. That universal health coverage includes public goods that address the social, economic, occupational and environmental determinants of health, such as clean water and sanitation, road safety, efforts to reduce air pollution and so on.
6. To work across sectors to achieve health goals, such as working with the energy sector to improve reduce air pollution and climate change. In the same way, other sectors need to work with the health sector to achieve their own goals.
7. To assessing knowledge, and translating and disseminating that knowledge in a way that governments can use to develop and implement policies.
8. To provide direct technical assistance to governments, translating that body of evidence to make a difference on the ground.
9. To engage even more proactively with civil society organizations and have invited them to suggest ideas on how we can work together more strategically and effectively.
10. Establish civil society working groups for tuberculosis and noncommunicable disease.

We wonder, given the pandemic, if these are still the same?