Watch remarks of WHO regional director Ahmed Al-Mandhari on ‘World Health Day’.
Al Mandhari: Health for all and by everyone
Ashraf AboArafe
In celebration of World Health Day April 7, Regional Director Ahmed Al-Mandhari confirmed in his opening remarks that the vision that the Eastern Mediterranean Health Organization has set for itself is “health for all and by all”.
Al-Mandri said that achieving this noble goal requires several priorities, but they are integrated priorities. In this context, the WHO Eastern Mediterranean has set the trend towards universal health coverage as its first strategic priority.
The WHO Regional Director explained that universal health coverage means that all individuals and communities are getting their needed health services, of good quality, without facing financial difficulties. Universal health coverage is the key to promoting social justice and ensuring health security as well as promoting economic development in all countries and societies. Universal health coverage cannot be achieved without qualified and healthy workers who work in the right place.
In fact, the countries that have managed to advance towards universal health coverage have done so by investing in the health workforce to ensure that sufficient teams of health workers are able to provide the required services with high quality, using the principles of health services that focus on individuals. .
This includes, in particular, the nursing and midwifery teams, who must be produced in sufficient numbers using high-quality training programs, employing them more closely to the communities they serve and enhance the role they play within health teams.
Today the World Health Organization publishes the State of the World’s Nursing Report for 2020.
The State of the World’s Nursing Report for 2020 indicates the need for at least one million additional nurses in our region. However, the number of nurses who graduate in the region compared to the population is the lowest among all other regions in the world.
