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Regional Director's Message

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Health systems are undergoing rapid change and the need to respond to the challenges of changing demographics, disease patterns, emerging and re emerging diseases, coupled with rising costs of health care delivery have forced a comprehensive review of health systems and their performance. As countries examine their health systems in greater depth to adjust to the changing demands, the number and complexity of problems identified increases. A number of issues, including governance in health, financing of health care, human resource imbalances, access and quality of health services, availability of information for informed decision-making along with the impact of reforms in other areas of the economy, significantly affect the ability of health systems to deliver.

Decision-makers at all levels need to appraise the variation in health system performance, identify factors that influence these inequities and articulate policies that will achieve better results in a variety of settings. Meaningful, comparable information on health system performance, and on key factors that explain performance variation, can strengthen the scientific foundations of health policy at international and national levels.

The WHO Regional Office for Eastern Mediterranean took the initiative to develop the Eastern Mediterranean Regional Health Systems Observatory. The main purpose is to contribute to the improvement of health system performance and outcomes in the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean Region, in terms of better health, fair financing and responsiveness of health systems.  This Observatory will monitor health system and policy reforms in countries of the Eastern Mediterranean and evaluate the attainment of outcomes and the efficiency of the health systems in ways that allows comparison over time and across countries, thus informing policy-makers. It will also build an evidence base on the relationship between the functions of the health system and their overall performance. 

The principal contribution of the Eastern MediterraneanRegional Health Systems Observatory is the health system profiles for all Member States in the Region, which have been developed on a standard template and can serve as an important tool for monitoring health reforms. It is expected that with the cooperation of Member States these profiles could be updated on a regular basis. In addition, a health system database has been developed, which allows comparison of key health system indicators across countries of the region despite limitations in the availability of data. The Observatory also provides technical and policy papers, publications, research activities and reports of meetings organized by the Regional Office in the area of health systems and services development.  

It is hoped that Member States, international agencies, academia and other stakeholders will use the information available on the Eastern Mediterranean Regional Health System Observatory website and actively participate to make this initiative a success. I would like to take this opportunity to emphasize that there are limitations with the availability of information among many countries. Every effort has been made to provide the most accurate and up-to-date information. Regular feedback and support from our member countries, especially the Ministries of Health, to update the information on the most recent advances of health systems is critical to the success and sustainability of this Observatory.