Conference Overview

Geneva Health Forum 2010: Thematic Overview

Globalization, Crisis, and Health Systems: Confronting Regional Perspectives

Health systems around the world are facing unprecedented challenges, many related to or exacerbated by globalization. The 2010 edition of the Geneva Health Forum aims to elucidate the global or transboundary issues that directly or indirectly influence health systems. It also aims to provide deeper insight into how health crises impact society as a whole.

As with any crisis -- be it health related, humanitarian, or environmental -- the current economic downturn presents challenges and threats for health systems. It reveals existing weaknesses and disparities, while offering new opportunities to re-examine health systems. Through dynamic confrontation of perspectives, the Geneva Health Forum 2010 aims to identify sustainable responses to crises, which ensure comprehensive primary healthcare, access to medicines, and prevention. It also addresses the power imbalances at the origin of most social inequalities in health.

In short, the following will be addressed and debated:

• Crises reveal existing weaknesses and disparities and offer opportunities for health systems to function on new grounds
• Crises can be local, but are increasingly global in their reach, and their impacts on health systems call for critical examination
• Globalization tends to open new health services markets (structure, systems, workforce, insurances, etc.) which can engender reorganization and redistribution of roles within national health systems
• Exploring concrete examples of local and regional responses to crises and impacts of globalization offers a rich source from which innovative local and global approaches can be formulated
• New forms of governance that include the numerous new local and global partners in health must be identified
• Information technologies facilitate the dissemination of information to increasingly diversified actors, local and global -- a phenomenon which poses new challenges and opportunities

The Geneva Health Forum 2010 will tackle these issues by confronting regional perspectives, bringing together local and regional examples. It gives priority to facilitating exchanges and diffusing lessons learned from local and regional initiatives, which can offer potential solutions to the global issues at hand.

• Click here for a detailed list of themes covered by the Geneva Health Forum 2010.
• Click here to download the Geneva Health Forum 2010 2nd announcement.