The health/medical industry uses a lot of technical terms and jargon, and the aid and development industry is no saint in this respect, either. When you start talk about health AND development, the jargon starts flowing like medication through a bilateral-funded central venous catheter into the superior vena cava to create scalable outcomes without a swing donor. See. Terrifying.

One of the terms that has been popping up a lot lately is “health systems strengthening”, and it’s a key aim of the UK’s aid programme. Here at Global Citizen, we think that it’s a really important idea, and crucial to the goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2030.

A health system isn’t just a hospital and a medical clinic. It consists of all of the organisations people and actions whose primary intent is to promote, restore or maintain health. This can include medical professionals, educators, transport, physical facilities, equipment, medications, leadership, government departments, community and non-profit organisations, communication systems, and entrepreneurs.

It’s through the input of all of these groups, that a country can keep its people healthy, respond to health emergencies, and achieve long-term improvements.

It’s the idea that if, for example, you have an Ebola emergency, you can’t just turn up after it starts, build a clinic in the middle of town, and expect everything to work out perfectly. Without trained local staff, community education, an established system to get supplies in and out, and experienced leadership, your odds of success aren’t nearly as good as they could be.

So this feeds into the idea that achieving a really narrow health goal isn’t as good as also helping to create the basic building blocks of a flexible health system that can respond to future challenges. Ebola didn’t take hold in Nigeria, partly because previous polio eradication efforts in the country also had the side-effect of creating a network of skilled local doctors who understood how to control epidemics, and had the facilities to get the job done. Because those building blocks were already in place, it’s likely that thousands of lives (and millions of pounds) were saved. 

The aim of health systems strengthening is to incorporate this long-term “building blocks” strategy into health programmes - even short term ones. We don’t want the Nigeria example to just be a happy accident, we want the legacy of aid money spent on health to be a stronger, more flexible health system that will serve people on an ongoing basis.

The Global Fund (which finances disease prevention) provides some other examples of successful health systems strengthening programmes. They include training health workers in local communities to provide diagnosis and care across a range of health issues, including AIDS, TB and malaria, as in Afghanistan. It could mean improving the quality of laboratory services by revising technical guidelines, as in Indonesia. In Eritrea, it meant developing the health information system from the ground up – writing the policies, designing the legal framework, developing the procedures for collecting health data. These are examples of improvements to health systems that don’t just serve to fix one disease - they are versatile.

Other examples are provided by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (an international effort to vaccinate kids against preventable diseases). Gavi works in some of the world’s poorest countries, where health system conditions can have big structural problems. From inadequate infrastructure, lack of trained healthcare workers and interruption in the supplies of essential commodities to a lack of data to track progress and no fridges to store vaccines, weak health systems represent a critical barrier to Gavi’s mission.

In some Gavi-eligible countries, a mother will walk hours in the heat with her new-born child only to be sent home because no trained health worker is available to administer vaccines, the facility ran out of syringes, or a power outage meant that the vaccines couldn’t be kept adequately refrigerated. This is the sort of problem that a strong health system can tackle.

Ahead of the 2015 General Election, we're calling on the UK's political parties to acknowledge the importance of health systems strengthening, and make it a priority in the next government. Now that legislation to protect the UK aid budget is being enshrined in law, we can start to make better long term plans for how our aid spending in areas like health can create better outcomes for maternal and newborn child health, disease control, and more.