The Platinum Decade: Accelerating health for billions: WHO South-East Asia Region 2014–2023

Overview

This book documents WHO’s activities and accomplishments during the decade from 2014 to 2023. It highlights what can be achieved when WHO, its Member States and partners develop and implement a shared vision based on effective planning, robust collaboration and transformative leadership. Dr Poonam Khetrapal Singh, Regional Director of the World Health Organization’s South-East Asia Region, took on the mantle of leadership for this Region in 2014. Her tenure commenced with the singular success of achieving the culmination of the Region’s decades-long public health quest: eradication of polio. This was WHO’s biggest health achievement since the eradication of smallpox in the 1980s.

That was just the beginning. The far-sighted Flagship Priority Programmes helped bolster the public health architecture in the Region. A series of laudable health achievements brought tangible changes to the ‘healthscape’ of South-East Asia and the state of well-being of its 2 billion people. This decade also experienced a never-before public health emergency of international concern in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. WHO, in collaboration with partners and countries, ensured minimal disruption to routine health services and immunization delivery programmes, and continued to extend universal health coverage even as pandemic prevention and control measures were unleashed with clinical precision.

This decade has been one of the most eventful in the history of the South-East Asia Region. Along with the seemingly insurmountable challenges, the book highlights what can be done through a shared vision, collaboration, determination and hard work, and above all, robust leadership. Academicians, policy-makers, public health professionals and others interested in the health and well-being of this Region’s vast population will find this book invaluable.