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Health Systems Flagship Program - Core Course

Created Dec 20 2023, 3:45 PM by Bruce Summers

The Health Systems Flagship Core Course is open to participants from inside and outside of the World Bank. The Global Flagship (Core) Course is offered once or twice a year.  In 2022, it reached almost 1,000 participants from countries in all Regions in five different languages. The Flagship Core Course can also be tailored for on individual country, to a region, or to a group of countries that share a common language and or common challenges.

The objective of the Flagship Core Course on Health Sector Reform and Sustainable Financing is to help participants think strategically and systematically about health sector reform and the challenges in achieving that reform. The course is not a deep dive for any specific technical area, rather it seeks to help participants better understand the complexity behind policy making and challenges of implementation to achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC).

The Flagship Core Course has been in existence for 25 years. The course has been delivered to 36,000+ participants in 70+ countries.

The Flagship Core Course presents a foundation for conceptualizing a systems-based approach to health. The course recommends a systems-based approach to identify the necessary policy levers for achieving desired health system objectives. Rather than offering a prescriptive predetermined list of interventions, the course presents options to policy makers. It enables them to consider the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches. It helps course participants to define their challenges. It provides them with information that enables them to come to their own decisions. 


Figure 1. The World Bank Health Systems Flagship Program Framework
 

The Flagship framework addresses multiple and simultaneous changes that may occur in the reform of a health system. Participants are taught how to think about health system reform in a strategic and comprehensive manner, and how to put learned theory into action. The course shares the pros and cons of different options for improving the performance of a health system. It enables course participants to build more evidence on how to implement positive changes successfully. The course also shares country experiences, what works as well as lessons learned on what to avoid.
 
The value of this course lays in the fact that it considers the reality each country faces, its cultural, political, and ethical contexts, as well as its objectives, capabilities, and constraints in conducting health system reform.

The course content is adjusted to fit the needs of its practitioners during times of global challenges and situations such as those presented by the outbreak of Ebola in 2015 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.