Work toward this outcome aims to protect achievements, accelerate progress, and reduce inequalities by increasing and improving universal access to comprehensive, quality health services focused on people, families, and communities. This is essential for the achievement of universal health and consistent with the aspirations of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This outcome recognizes the interdependence of individual, social, environmental, temporal, and intergenerational factors, and the differential effects of these interactions in several sensitive periods in the life course. It seeks to improve national capacity to create a sound normative environment that promotes equitable access to quality health services focused on people, families, and communities. Central to these efforts is the promotion of effective multidisciplinary teams, intersectoral work, and social participation in the coproduction of health and well-being, looking beyond survival to generate the ability of people and populations to thrive and transform. This outcome includes all age groups (newborns, children, adolescents, adult women and men), with a special focus on groups in conditions of vulnerability. It will be necessary to:

a) Expand equitable access to comprehensive, quality health services with a strengthened first level of care, coordinated and organized in integrated health networks. These networks should include social and community services that guarantee continuity of care and respond to older people’s need to maintain their functional capacity and their optimal ability to live in and interact with their communities.

b) Strengthen the leadership and governance of health systems, the active social participation and empowerment of communities and individuals as drivers of their own health, and intersectoral coordination to address the social determinants of health and aging.

c) Achieve effective integration of social and health care that helps ensure the sustainability of coverage and universal access to health for older persons, including long-term care for those who need it.

d) Establish financing mechanisms that prevent direct payment from becoming an access barrier to services or leading to the impoverishment of older persons and their families.

Note: For further details on the scope of this Outcome, please refer to the PAHO Strategic Plan 20-25 Document.