Gambia

The Constitution does not include a right to health per se. Under the chapter dedicated to "Directive Principles of State Policy" , it is provided that the State shall endeavour to facilitate equal access to clean and safe water, adequate health and medical services, habitable shelter, sufficient food and security to all persons (art. 216.4). However, these Principles of State Policy do not confer legal rights and are not enforceable in court (art. 211).

The Constitution does not include specific provisions regarding competence for health issues.

The main goal of the "National Health Policy 2021-2030: Building Partnerships for Quality Health Care for All" is to provide quality, affordable, and accessible health care services for all in The Gambia (page 13).

The policy identifies a set of ten priorities with corresponding policy objectives and strategies. The ten priorities include ensuring quality and equitable essential health services for all towards UHC, improving maternal, childhood, and reproductive health services, addressing communicable and non-communicable diseases, building a resilient and responsive health system, integrating health information systems and research, promoting environmental health and addressing social determinants of health, providing financial risk protection and equity, ensuring a continuum of care and tertiary health services, decentralizing governance and service delivery, and fostering partnerships (pages 16-34).

Specific strategies involving laws and regulations include: developing and implementing regulations to improve quality of care across all levels of the healthcare delivery (page 16), strengthening the legislative and regulatory framework to ensure that medicines, health products, technologies and equipment are in accordance with approved standards and specifications (page 23), ensuring the establishment and maintenance of the regulatory mechanism to effectively integrate and control traditional medicine (page 25), ensuring the enactment of appropriate legislation for health system's governance (page 25), developing a health information legal framework to ensure the mandatory, timely and complete reporting of data by Public and Private Health facilities (page 26).

The main goal of the "National Health Sector Strategic Plan 2021-2025" is to provide quality, affordable, and accessible health care services for all in The Gambia (page 18).

The plan is based on the ten priorities identified in the National Health Policy. These include ensuring quality and equitable essential health services, improving maternal, childhood, and reproductive health services, addressing communicable and non-communicable diseases, building a resilient and responsive health system, integrating health information systems and research, promoting environmental health and addressing social determinants of health, providing financial risk protection and equity, ensuring a continuum of care and tertiary health services, enhancing governance and service delivery, and fostering partnerships (pages 5-6, 27-98).

The main legislative and regulatory instruments governing health are highlighted in a dedicated section of the plan (section "legal framework for health") (pages 14-15).

Specific strategies and activities involving laws and regulations include: ensuring the availability and implementation of regulations or SOPs to improve quality of care across all levels of the healthcare delivery (page 27), reviewing and upgrading pharmaceutical regulations (page 55), constituting a regulatory body to accredit laboratories using international standards (page 61), ensuring the enactment of appropriate legislation for health system's governance (page 62), formulating a robust risk management legislation and regulation to reduce enterprise risk (page 63), ensuring the establishment and maintenance of the regulatory mechanism to integrate and control traditional medicine (page 64), developing a regulation for mandatory, timely and complete reporting of data by Public and Private Health facilities (page 69), developing/reviewing health Acts/Regulations/Legislations (page 96).