Making health care universal around the world still poses a challenge especially due to lack of funds, politics, lack of infrastructures and inadequate human resource, and irregular access to health facilities. Despite being one of the most important basic human needs, healthcare is still a great challenge for many countries in terms of designing the necessary health systems that would offer citizens easy access to quality services. To overcome these challenges, the policy shift efforts should be scaled-up besides, enhanced investment, and multilateral collaboration.
Many of them include lack of resources to cater for the needs of the patients, lack of funds to finance research activities, and lack of cash to meet the various expenses that are incurred in the health facilities. Most of the LMIC face constraints in terms of available resources to finance UHC, putting a huge burden on patients through cost-sharing. Due to inadequate government spending on health, health care is still a luxury and not a right, millions of people cannot access basic health care and preventive care services.
Another major challenge that hampers the achievement of effective supply chain management is political resistance. The reasons why some governments are against universal healthcare are either due to organizational beliefs or economic implications. Most of the time, giant health sector and drugs companies work hard to block change which may decrease their revenues. This hinders the advancement of the issue and the implementation of policies that would bend towards the health of the people and not benefiting the companies.
Lack of healthcare infrastructure also creates challenges to the efforts. Those rural and underdeveloped regions are deprived of necessary healthcare facilities together with primary treatment establishments and state-of-the-art devices. Even with the high level of funding, the systems do not achieve the goal of functional universal health care if facilities have not been provided. Extending infrastructure depends on fulfilling multimillion dollar projects, long-term strategic thinking and action and cooperation of governments as well as international organizations.
Lack of workforce and disparities in access to healthcare also pose a challenge. There are numerous countries that currently suffer from an absence of either doctors, nurses or other healthcare professionals, meaning that people have to wait for their turn and in some instances, they never get attended to at all! Also, the failed healthcare reform fails to address inequities where minorities are rated inferior to others regarding their healthcare rights. To address such concerns, there is a need for enhanced training, reasonable wages and policies that would extend health care service access to all of society.
Conclusion
Universal healthcare coverage requires immediate insistence, proper investment and political will. It is apparent from the above statements that financial issues, political influence, physical structures, human resources, and inadequate accessibility are factors that need to be worked on. The governments need to focus on not undermining human health to provide care as a business model. Collaboration across the globe is the key to the development of systems that offer quality care to society.
