New UN resolution aims to fix health facilities worldwide

The United Nations General Assembly has adopted a new resolution to address the lack of basic services in clinics, hospitals, and health outposts around the world. It’s the first time such significant action has been taken at this level on the issue, experts said, expressing hope that the resolution will bring about tangible change by recognizing the critical role of water, sanitation, and hygiene, or WASH, in health care. As it stands, half of the world’s health care facilities operate without water, soap, or alcohol-based hand gel, leaving doctors unable to wash equipment or their hands, creating a prime environment for infection and antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. One in 4 facilities is unable to segregate its health care waste, and one billion people use health care facilities that don’t have reliable electricity, rendering lifesaving technology useless. Subsequently, each year 8 million people in 137 low- and middle-income countries die due to poor quality health care, with an estimated global economic cost of $6 trillion in lost productivity. “There's a sheer economic component to this, never mind the [impact on] quality of life and care for mothers and children, and all of those very important elements,” said Anthony Rock, a senior adviser to the World Health Organization, on this issue and former principal of Global Water 2020. Yet WASH in health settings has long been an underfunded issue. WASH in general has a 70.3% funding gap across 41 countries, according to a 2023 research. The U.N. resolution for sustainable, safe, and universal WASH, waste, and electricity services in health care facilities, encourages governments to tackle such gaps by creating national road maps that factor in the delivery of these services into programming, financing, monitoring, and evaluation. Having plans that put a solid price on installing these services will be “a very powerful motivator,” said Rock, in requesting financial support from the likes of the World Bank and other development assistance agencies. The resolution also pushes for countries to create intersectoral task forces, recognizing that the fall out of not having such features in facilities isn’t limited to health but has repercussions for the economy, infrastructure, and poverty. It also calls for the training of health workers to promote good hygiene practices. The aim, Anna Maria Atanaszov, second secretary of the committee delegate with the Permanent Mission of Hungary to the U.N., told Devex in an email, is to ensure that discussions on sustainable, safe, and universal WASH, waste, and electricity services are “seamlessly integrated” into high-level discussions around universal health coverage, AMR, and the Sustainable Development Goals. Hungary, which chairs the water and health protocol for Europe, co-sponsored the resolution alongside the Philippines while it was put forward by the U.N. Group of Friends for WASH in health care facilities. It follows the signing of a WASH in health care facilities resolution by ministers at the World Health Assembly in 2019, which didn’t generate as much progress as hoped. While 85% of countries surveyed by WHO had conducted situational analyses in the years since, more than two-thirds still don’t have costed national strategies, and around 90% are missing WASH indicators in their national health systems monitoring. But Rock said that this latest resolution is “picking up and elevating the significance of something that had already been highlighted for action.” To ensure it leads to tangible progress, the resolution committed U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to provide, in consultation with WHO and UNICEF, a progress report in 2025.