World Health Organization head Margaret Chan is reviving a 30-year-old approach to providing universal health care to meet United Nations goals for development and her commitment to helping women and Africans.

Chan, 61, is emphasizing primary health care as a means to providing equitable access to care and efficiency in service delivery -- goals described in the so-called Declaration of Alma Ata in 1978 that targeted ``health for all'' by 2000 and which the WHO concluded in 1994 weren't achievable. The new plan for primary health will be detailed in the Geneva-based agency's World Health Report, scheduled for release next month.

``I hope to be able to, with the support of my member states, revive primary health care,'' Chan, the WHO's director- general, said yesterday in an interview in Manila. ``I am more optimistic this time.''

Chan, a former director of health in Hong Kong and the first person from China to lead a UN agency, says improved primary health care will enable health systems to tackle a wider range of needs, rather than select areas such as HIV/AIDS that typified programs introduced since the 1990s.

It will also speed progress in meeting the three of the eight UN Millennium Development Goals concerning cutting child mortality, improving maternal health and fighting HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases by 2015.

Source: Bloomberg, 24 September 2008