For the first time ever, WHO, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank joined efforts to produce a document - Delivering quality health services: A global imperative for universal health coverage – that describes the essential role of quality in strengthening the health system and health security.  Quality of care is essential to creating trust in health services and a key to global health security, which starts with local health security, and in turn depends on high-quality frontline health services. Quality health services not only prevent human suffering and ensure healthier societies, they also ensure better human capital and healthier economies.

“At WHO we are committed to ensuring that people everywhere can obtain health services when and where they need them,” said WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “We are equally committed to ensuring that those services are good quality. Quite honestly, there can be no universal health coverage without quality care.”

 “Without quality health services, universal health coverage will remain an empty promise,” said OECD Secretary-General Ángel Gurría. “The economic and social benefits are clear and we need to see a much stronger focus on investing in and improving quality to create trust in health services and give everyone access to high-quality, people-centred health services.” 

“Good health is the foundation of a country’s human capital, and no country can afford low-quality or unsafe healthcare,” World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said. “Low-quality care disproportionately impacts the poor, which is not only morally reprehensible, it is economically unsustainable for families and entire countries.” 

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