Global health is at a crossroads. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has come with ambitious targets for health and health services worldwide. To reach these targets, many more billions of dollars need to be spent on health. However, development assistance for health has plateaued and domestic funding on health in most countries is growing at rates too low to close the financing gap. National and international decision-makers face tough choices about how scarce health care resources should be spent. Should additional funds be spent on primary prevention of stroke, treating childhood cancer, or expanding treatment for HIV/AIDS? Should health coverage decisions take into account the effects of illness on productivity, household finances, and children's educational attainment, or just focus on health outcomes? Does age matter for priority setting or should it be ignored? Are health gains far in the future less important than gains in the present? Should higher priority be given to people who are sicker or poorer? Global Health Priority-Setting provides a framework for how to think about evidence-based priority-setting in health. Over 18 chapters, ethicists, philosophers, economists, policy-makers, and clinicians from around the world assess the state of current practice in national and global priority setting, describe new tools and methodologies to address establishing global health priorities, and tackle the most important ethical questions that decision-makers must consider in allocating health resources.

An in-depth review of the challenges of neoliberal models and policies for realizing the right to health.

States face multiple ongoing and emerging challenges, from climate change to global disease, mass atrocities to forced displacement, humanitarian crises to entrenched global poverty, and are constrained by material and political limits to the amount of resources that they can devote to these issues. How should states decide which issues to prioritize and which crises to address? Prioritizing Global Responsibilities answers this question by proposing a two-level account of just prioritization that aims to be both philosophically sound and practically relevant. The authors assess several potential prioritization principles, including diversification, culpability, urgency, disadvantage, and national interest, and argue that states should prioritize issues where they can assist most effectively and where they can help those who are most underprivileged.

The World Health Report 2012, the biannual flagship report of the World Health Organization, focuses for the first time in its history on the theme of research for better health. Decisions on healthcare are still made without a solid grounding in research evidence, and an impetus is required for this state of affairs to change. Aimed at ministers of health, the report provides new ideas, innovative thinking, and pragmatic advice on how to strengthen health research systems.WHO and PLoS have launched an initiative to encourage researchers to complement and substantiate the key messages in World Health Report 2012 by creating a special WHO/PLoS Collection. PLoS invited the submission of papers, especially from low- and middle-income countries, on topics related to strengthening of key functions and components of national health research systems.The World Health Report 2012 focuses on eight specific areas, discussed in the editorial, within the theme of 'No Health Without Research.' We highlight below some examples of articles previously published in PLoS journals in these specific areas of interest.Now iMedPub brings this collection to you within a book.

Adds to the debate on priority setting by looking at experience from other countries.

Scholars from a range of disciplines examine the pressing challenges of global health governance and the development of global health policy. Adrian Kay from Griffith University, Australia.

'Global Health Priority-Setting' provides a framework for how to think about evidence-based priority-setting in health. Over 18 chapters, ethicists, philosophers, economists, policy-makers, and clinicians from around the world assess the state of current practice in national and global priority setting, describe new tools and methodologies to address establishing global health priorities, and tackle the most important ethical questions that decision-makers must consider in allocating health resources.--