PLOS Medicine launches a new Collection on Universal Health Coverage

A new PLOS Medicine collection, Monitoring Universal Health Coverage, provides technical details and country-level experience of the implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of Universal Health Coverage, adding much needed insight to the global conversation on this topic.

Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is the desired outcome for health system performance, whereby all people who need the full spectrum of health services – promotion, prevention, treatment, rehabilitation and palliation – receive them according to need and without resulting in financial hardship.

The high-profile nature of the event held at The Rockefeller Center (more information here) at which the Collection will launch is fitting for the topic that has emerged as front-runner of the post-2015 development agenda. UHC has been the focus of much work and effort by the international community in order to turn its broad aims into an actionable framework.

The papers in this collection offer insight into current international thinking about the essential UHC components—coverage, financial protection, and equity—and how these might be monitored and evaluated in practice. The 13 country case studies discuss progress towards the monitoring and evaluation of UHC in the featured countries and are authored by national experts.

Authors of the collection conclude that the future monitoring of progress towards the desired goals of UHC relies heavily on addressing the gaps in the availability of good quality data and ensuring that each country develops a full UHC monitoring framework, with regular overall health progress and performance reviews.

The discussion of UHC continues in the PLOS Medicine September editorial where the focus turns to crucial considerations needed as momentum behind UHC grows, such as ensuring a concerted and integrated monitoring and evaluation effort across other key global health movements and action plans to avoid the much-criticized silo approach of the Millennium Development Goals.

To read the collection, please visit: www.ploscollections.org/uhc2014

To learn more on the UHC event, ‘Delivering On Universal Health Coverage’, starting at 6pm ET today, please visit: http://eepurl.com/1V0oT

For more information on PLOS Collections, please contact collections@plos.org