Healthy Futures: What are the challenges in making healthcare more sustainable?

Good health and well-being for all are essential to eliminating inequality and poverty and ensuring societies are resilient in the face of the steep economic and climate-related challenges ahead.

But there’s a lot of work to do in order to ensure healthy futures: getting a handle on infectious diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria as well as non-communicable (but equally pervasive) diseases like diabetes and obesity, ending preventable maternal and infant deaths that persist even in some of the most developed economies, and ensuring access to quality healthcare (including mental healthcare) for everyone, to name a few.

Then factor in the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, which is not only causing widespread illness and death but also impairing our ability to deal with many other challenges, health-related and otherwise.

With resources diverted to the pandemic response, we’re seeing new outbreaks of measles – despite the fact there’s already a safe and effective vaccine for it – and we risk a rise in other deadly diseases including tuberculosis, cholera and malaria, as well.

Social isolation, fear and economic hardship are exacerbating the ongoing mental health crisis; in the United States, as one example, the number of adults who seriously contemplated suicide nearly doubled at the height of the pandemic in late spring.

And with a disproportionately devastating impact on communities of color, the elderly and society's most vulnerable, the virus is “unveiling the structural weaknesses of not only our economic systems, but also, more critically, our health systems,” as World Economic Forum experts put it.

SDG 3 is ambitious, setting out to reduce or eliminate a number of health-related problems, including:

The world is understandably consumed by COVID-19, but it’s not the only challenge – or even the only infectious disease – we need to worry about in order to achieve the SDG 3 targets by 2030.

According to the UN’s SDG Progress Report 2020, there has been noteworthy progress, but not nearly enough to meet most of the targets.

Significant progress has been made in areas like reducing preventable maternal and infant deaths, increasing childhood immunization rates and increasing access to reproductive healthcare.

For example, the maternal mortality ratio fell by 38% between 2000-2017, a 2.9% decline each year – but it needs to fall 6.4% each year “to achieve the global target of 70 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births by 2030.”

Similarly, childhood immunization rates have been steadily rising, with coverage of the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP3) vaccine increasing from 72% in 2000 to 86% in 2018, and the measles vaccine from 19% to 69% in the same time frame. Still, in 2018, as many as 19.4 million children worldwide did not receive these vaccines.

Now, what progress has been made has been thrown “further off track” by COVID-19, explains the progress report. With health systems strained, resources diverted to the pandemic response and lockdowns disrupting access to healthcare facilities, we’re seeing disappointing setbacks – such as the resurgence in measles.

Above all, it underlines the need to make more progress on achieving universal health coverage (UHC) – which is essential to beat COVID-19, and to achieve the other targets. “If current trends continue, only 39% to 64% of the global population will be covered" by essential health services, says the progress report. Meanwhile, the number of people spending more than 10% of their household budgets on healthcare continues to rise – which in this time of economic turmoil, means more people could delay routine medical appointments, putting adults and children of all ages at risk of preventable infectious diseases, as well as unnecessary suffering from cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease or mental illness.

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