Health markets: Gerry Bloom and David Peters in Nature

Gerry Bloom, STEPS health convenor and David Peters (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) have a comment piece in Nature today, on the challenge of unregulated health markets in the developing world.

“Bringing order to unruly health markets is a major challenge. Yet the problem is largely ignored by governments and international agencies. The World Health Organization (WHO) continues to highlight a shortage of primary health workers as the main barrier to accessing health care in low- and middle-income countries. It neglects the growing presence of drug sellers, rural medical practitioners and other informally trained health-care providers. 

To find better ways to meet the health and welfare needs of the poor, we need to look beyond ideological debates about public and private sectors and improve how these evolving markets operate. This will not be easy, because health markets are complicated and interventions have unpredictable consequences…”

This article comes ahead of the book Transforming Health Markets in Asia and Africa: Improving quality and access for the poor, which will be out in the STEPS Centre’s Pathways to Sustainability book series.