Priorities Health Care

This handbook synthesizes and analyzes the growing knowledge base on life course health development (LCHD) from the prenatal period through emerging adulthood, with implications for clinical practice and public health. It presents LCHD as an innovative field with a sound theoretical framework for understanding wellness and disease from a lifespan perspective, replacing previous medical, biopsychosocial, and early genomic models of health.

As a low-income country, Ethiopia has made impressive progress in improving health outcomes. Ethiopia Health Extension Program examines how the country s Health Extension Program (HEP) has contributed to the move toward Universal Health Coverage (UHC), and it sheds light on how other countries may learn from Ethiopia s experiences of HEP when designing their own path to UHC. One of the government s UHC strategies, HEP was introduced with limited resources and few essential health services.

Current global health priorities, such as the targets of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), are ambitious. Setting an agenda for the next 15 years, targets have been established to drastically reduce maternal mortality and premature mortality from noncommunicable diseases; end the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and neglected tropical diseases; achieve universal health coverage; and ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health care services, among others.