For the 152nd Session of the WHO Executive Board meeting, ESMO submitted an official statement on the agenda item ‘Universal Health Coverage’.
ESMO welcomed the WHO’s call to accelerate and intensify priority actions towards achieving Universal Health Coverage by 2030 as outlined in the Director-General’s Report.
The current situation is that many countries are not on track to achieve Universal Health Coverage by 2030 as called for in the 2015 United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and the 2019 United Nations High-Level Meeting on Universal Coverage.
Therefore, ESMO invited Member States to draw upon ESMO’s cancer resources in their efforts to deliver the 3 strands of Universal Health Coverage:
- The ‘ESMO Global Curriculum in Medical Oncology’ can support training the necessary workforce to ‘increase population coverage’.
- The evidence-based ‘ ESMO Clinical Practice Guidelines’ and ‘Pan-Asian Adapted Guidelines’ can support decisions to cost-effectively ‘expand essential health services’.
- The ‘ESMO-Magnitude of Clinical Benefit Scale’ can support countries to prioritize the use of cancer medicines to both improve health outcomes and ‘reduce the financial burden of health services’.
ESMO has already assisted 5 WHO Member States deliver cost-effective cancer services in their Universal Health Coverage packages, and remains available to help others to do the same.
The United Nations will hold its second High-Level Meeting on Universal Health Coverage on 20 September 2023 in New York. ESMO will advocate for the needs of medical oncologists and their patients to be addressed and included in the political declaration resulting from the meeting.