Leading Voices: MSH’s Colin Gilmartin on Helping Countries Improve Their Primary Health Care Systems 

How can low- and middle-income countries maximize the return on investment of public health funding?  

In the latest video in our Leading Voices series, Colin Gilmartin, MSH’s Principal Technical Advisor for Health Care Financing, discusses how ministries of health and their partners in six countries are successfully using MSH’s new Primary Health Care Costing Analysis and Planning Tool (PHC-CAP Tool) with the goal of ensuring that adequate funding is available for strengthening and sustaining quality primary health care services. 

“When countries use those investments to build and maintain a strong primary health care system, they’re making themselves more resilient against future shocks, future stressors, creating a system that can hopefully detect and prevent future epidemics, that are quite costly,” says Gilmartin.

“Primary health care is considered to be a 3-for-1 investment toward universal health coverage, toward better health security, and toward improved health and wellbeing for the entire population.”