A Systems Approach to Achieving Health for All in the Community

Health systems embrace the input and output, or outcome, of the health of a society or country. Performance of governments in population health is linked to the capacity and capability of respective health system in the policy, strategy, devel-opment, implementation, monitoring and financing healthcare in the community at the three levels of health services in preventive, curative and rehabilitative care. Most systems, often embedded with unpredictable behaviours, are not built with the capacity to understand or assess strengths, weaknesses or constraints in parts of or the whole health system. A systems approach will strengthen health systems and provide a framework for improvement and enhancement of the performance and efficiency. It helps to review the complexity, characteristics and relationships of the entire health system, which is constantly changing for obvious reasons. Systems thinking facil-itates the design, implementation and evaluation of strategic and innovative plans, from simple to complicated interventions, for the successful and effective operations in services delivery in the equitable manner to the population. The adoption of the systems thinking approach will enable policymakers, academics and practitioners with scientifically sound plans to attain health improvement in the community. The WHO’s framework of health system building blocks effectively describes six subsys-tems of an overall health system architecture. The chapter will review the systems approach and explore its feasibility and practicality in healthcare, particularly in achieving Health for All in the community.