Health system strengthening crucial

The success of health initiatives around the world is relying heavily on "health system strengthening" in developing countries.

However, this is not being achieved as too much emphasis is being placed upon ideas specific to individual diseases and not enough attention is being pad to health systems.

That is the view of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, which has claimed that global health organisations need to do more to help.

In the Public Library of Science Medicine, Bruno Marchal from the institute said: "We found a clear gap between the language used by global health actors and their actual activities.

"Virtually all global health actors claim to support health systems, but instead they focus on disease-specific interventions or on activities targeting health system functions essential for implementation of their own programmes."

Mr Marchal is leading a review of organisations including the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; Roll Back Malaria; the African Programme for Onchocerciasis Control and the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Disease Control.

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