As health challenges grow more diverse and complex, and public budgets tighten, WHO Member States are increasingly looking to more integrated public health capacity and services that can better promote and protect people’s health, prevent illness and respond to emerging threats. More than 120 countries have identified building institutional capacity to deliver essential public health functions (EPHFs) as a medium-to-high priority for WHO support.
The shift comes as fragmented programmes, uneven workforce investment, and reliance on external financing in low- and middle-income countries make public health capacity harder to sustain. These pressures can also limit the ability of governments to respond effectively to both everyday health needs and emergencies.
“Countries need public health systems that can do more with limited resources,” said Dr Kalipso Chalkidou, Director of the Performance, Financing and Delivery Department at WHO. “Essential public health functions provide a practical and tested way to bring core capabilities together at the country level, using resources more efficiently while placing promotion, prevention and preparedness at the heart of health systems.”
Building national institutional capacity to deliver EPHFs is a dedicated output of WHO’s Fourteenth General Programme of Work (GPW14) – WHO’s global strategy for 2025–2028. EPHFs are the core public health actions and services countries need to keep people healthy and safe. They bring together four broad areas:
Their delivery also depends on effective leadership, workforce, governance and coordination between health and allied sectors.
Too often, these functions are planned, financed and delivered separately. WHO’s EPHFs framework therefore helps governments connect them across sectors and levels of the health system, so that keeping people healthy receives sustained attention, alongside treating people when they become ill. National Public Health Institutes (NPHIs), ministries of health and other public health authorities have a central role in putting this approach into practice, from subnational to national levels and across primary, secondary and tertiary care.
