write three functions of W.H.O
Answers
Answer:
These functions are:
These functions are:• Providing leadership on matters critical to health and engaging in partnerships where joint action is needed;
These functions are:• Providing leadership on matters critical to health and engaging in partnerships where joint action is needed;• Shaping the research agenda and stimulating the generation, translation and dissemination of valuable knowledge;
Answer:
The work of the WHO is defined by its Constitution, which divides WHO’s core functions into three categories: (1) normative functions, including international conventions and agreements, regulations and non-binding standards and recommendations; (2) directing and coordinating functions, including its health for all, poverty and health, and essential medicine activities and its specific disease programs; (3) research and technical cooperation functions,12 including disease eradication and emergencies.
Over the past fifty years or so, the WHO has gone through various permutations in prioritizing different aspects of these categories over others, and its effectiveness in doing so has been the subject of analysis and criticism.13 For example, in one of the most comprehensive analyses of the WHO, Fiona Godlee critiqued WHO’s management, effectiveness, policy choices, headquarter-regional negotiations and power struggle, and its weak operational capacity in a series of articles in the British Medical Journal in the mid-1990s.14 At about the same time, a self-study commissioned by the WHO analyzed the institutions effectiveness in implementing its core functions and recommended reforms focused especially on strengthening its technical capacity and its global health and coordinating functions.15 And in 1996–1997, the WHO Executive Board held 6 special meetings to review the Constitution, recommending rewriting WHO’s core functions to emphasize coordination, health policy development, norms and standards, advocating health for all, and advice and technical cooperation.16
In the late 1990s, a group of international health scholars and practitioners gathered in Pocantico, New York for a retreat on “Enhancing the Performance of International Health Institutions” to examine whether the institutional structure in international health was sufficient for a 21st century of global health interdependence. The Pocantico report concluded, “the importance of WHO was seen primarily for its global normative functions which need to be strengthened and updated,”17 that “the emphasis on technical assistance has often come at the expense of the normative role”, that “WHO should be the ‘normative conscience’ for world health” and that “WHO should assume leadership in achieving more coherence and equity in the system.”18 A clear emphasis was placed on WHO’s global, especially normative, functions. This perspective was reiterated in an article by Jamison, Frenk and Knaul,19 who argued that WHO had two separate types of functions: core (including global normative work) and supplementary (including technical cooperation). While the demand for both types has increased, the majority of new global health actors address primarily operational functions, creating an even greater need for WHO’s core global functions.