The annual Board meeting at World Health Organization (WHO) is held in Geneva in January every year, and this is when the member states agree upon the agenda for the World Health Assembly and the resolutions to be considered by the Health Assembly.
The 150th session of the Executive Board convened between 24-29 January 2022. Following two days of engaged interventions from WHO, Member States, UN agencies and Non-State Actors, the Executive Board agreed to request the 75th World Health Assembly to adopt the important Annexes that will underpin WHO’s NCD programmes. WSO particularly welcomes the recommendation of the EB to adopt the Intersectoral Global Action Plan on Epilepsy and other Neurological Disorders. Through a partnership with OneNeurology, we have helped shaping the Global Action Plan during the consultation process making sure that it includes all neurological disorders.
Another agenda item that WSO followed closely was 15:3 WHO’s work in health emergencies. To reinforce the recommendations made in our position paper (link to the paper) Preventing the Next Pandemic: The Case for Investing in Circulatory Health, launched in October 2021, we did the below statement.
Honourable Chair,
Distinguished Delegates,
People living with circulatory conditions are disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The lack of attention to NCDs in the early stages of the pandemic impeded their inclusion in strategic response plans and few countries included NCDs as part of essential health services packages. This has resulted in a deadly interplay between the NCD epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic.
NCDs including hypertension, kidney disease, diabetes, stroke, and other circulatory conditions must be a top priority in preparedness, response, readiness and coordination activities and agreements at global, regional and country levels.
As such, our organisations, representing the global circulatory health community (those most impacted by COVID-19), call on Member States to
• Prioritize ongoing prevention, screening, and treatment for circulatory conditions in national COVID-19 response and recovery plans through patient co-creation.
• Increase domestic allocation of resources and develop targeted policies to tackle CVD and NCD risk factors, including the commercial determinants of health, through mechanisms such as taxation of unhealthy commodities.
• Integrate monitoring and data collection on NCD prevalence, comorbidities, and risk factors into measures of pandemic readiness, resilience, and response.
• Strengthen Primary Health Care and invest in family medicine to ensure equitable access to essential health services, particularly for people living with NCDs and in low-resource settings; and
• Strengthen the NCD component of emergency preparedness and response by formalizing these actions in a WHO convention, agreement or international instrument on pandemic preparedness.
These steps would go far in making health systems more resilient and are expanded upon in our position paper. We look forward to working with you to prevent, and where necessary, respond to future health emergencies.
Thank you.
Global Coalition for Circulatory Health
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