How could our little ones’ ideas inspire strides towards Universal Health Coverage?

Health makes the world go round

Universal health coverage is the provision of inclusive healthcare for all, where individuals and communities receive the care they need without suffering financial hardship. This includes essential health services ranging from health promotion to prevention, treatment, rehabilitation and palliative care². 

The Sustainable Development Goals call for universal health coverage by 2030³, but there is still a long way to go to meet this target. In fact, every year approximately 100 million people are still pushed into extreme poverty (which means they are living on $1.90 or less per day) as a result of their healthcare expenditure⁴; and WHO estimates that up to 400 million people⁵ are still living without immunizations, family planning services and basic hospital access. How can we work to standardize healthcare and provide all populations with access to the care that they need? 

Philips and other organizations can play a key strategic role in innovating solutions and business models for primary care, using new technologies to provide levels of care that were unthinkable in the past. We must particularly consider the widely neglected areas of technology and infrastructure, which are stifling care quality in many low-middle income countries.

Big ideas from little minds

With constant innovations and demographic changes to consider, the healthcare spectrum and the needs of the global population are changing all the time. We need to understand the needs of future generations in order to be able to provide inclusive care, so who better to turn to than the decision makers of these generations themselves? It’s this thinking that inspired Philips’ YoungWEF campaign, which considers the perspective of the world’s most curious minds – kids.

In 2017, we asked parents to share their children’s visions for the future of healthcare. This year, we turned the tables to let kids ask the biggest question of all – ‘why’. Children have an inherent inquisitiveness that helps them to challenge the status quo and come up with unique solutions to problems that, as adults, we may not consider. Kids’ suggestions for treatment range from medicine that tastes like chocolate to magic ‘superpills’ that can cure any disease. Unsurprisingly, robots are another popular topic among our little ones – but with ideas including robot doctors and robot pets who can monitor our health in our own homes, our children could help to inspire practical uses of emerging technologies that could help to overcome the UHC challenge.