Technical Areas

Core Functions – Six Health System Building Blocks

Since the release of the World Health Organization’s World Health Report in 2000, global consensus has advanced on the core functions of a working health system. The following core functions describe how a working health system performs. USAID’s Bureau for Global Health works with many developing countries to help them advance toward achieving these standards.

• Service Delivery ensures safe, quality preventive, promotive, curative, and rehabilitative health interventions when and where they are needed, with minimum waste of resources. Effective health services are based on science and reliably follow evidence-based guidelines. They include an organized program for measuring and improving quality.
  
  
• Health Workforce means that sufficient numbers and mix of staff and volunteers are fairly distributed, efficient, responsive, and competent to achieve the best health outcomes possible given available resources and circumstances.
  
  
• Health Information translates into the production, analysis, dissemination, and use of reliable and timely information.
  
  
• Pharmaceutical Procurement and Management is a set of practices that ensures equitable and timely access to essential medical products; vaccines and technologies of assured quality, safety, and efficacy; and scientifically sound and cost-effective use of pharmaceuticals.
  
  
• Health Care Financing mobilizes adequate resources to pay for health needs from sources that are reliable over time; pools resources efficiently and equitably; and allocates resources in ways that optimize health impact, promote efficiency, and enhance equity.
  
  
• Leadership/Governance rationalizes health system roles so that the Ministry of Health operates as the steward of the health system with oversight and accountability, while citizens, civil society, and the private sector are empowered to provide input and assume new health sector roles and responsibilities. Effective governance depends on the use of effective leadership and management by all parties.

Source: Everybody’s business: strengthening health systems to improve health outcomes: WHO’s framework for action. © World Health Organization 2007