The webinar announced in the March Governance Newsletter took place on 11 April 2025. This event, which focused on the challenges of financing universal health coverage in Colombia and Peru, was the result of a collaboration between two of the P4H Network’s academic members, University of Antioquia in Colombia and the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.
As reported last month, the collaborative webinar between the P4H Network’s members University of Antioquia (UdeA) in Colombia and the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), was held on 11 April 2025. The challenges of financing universal health coverage (UHC) in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) were discussed. Advancing UHC requires sustainable financing strategies, translated into well-resourced budgets supporting robust approaches, thereby promoting access to quality health care. Social health protection is one of those approaches, as it eliminates direct payment, which is a barrier to access at the time of procuring services.
Keynote speaker Claudia Pescetto, from the Pan American Health Organization, used a recent report on progress towards UHC to highlight issues for the LAC region in general. According to Claudia, principal issues in the region are unmet needs, stagnating service coverage, health financing (HF) challenges and nonfinancial barriers to care. All these points were developed further in the webinar, including insightful examples from countries other than Peru and Colombia.
The consensus among the three speakers was that one of the major challenges to advancing UHC in an equitable way is obtaining a sufficient portion of public funds to invest in health. However, it was agreed during the discussion that, although basic precepts for best practices for enhancing HF include, for example, improving the efficient usage of budgeted funds, there is not a one-size-fits-all solution.
The webinar recording is available in Spanish on YouTube which, at the time of writing this article, has received 355 views.
