As the international community works toward new global goals—including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Paris Accord on Climate Change, and the New Urban Agenda—building up health systems that provide everyone with access to the care they need is crucial. This is the crux of a chapter by IntraHealth International's Pape Gaye and Gracey Vaughn in a new book released today, A New Global Agenda: Priorities, Practices, & Pathways of the International Community.

“By 2030, there will be 8.5 billion of us,” Gaye and Vaughn write. “The global demand for health care will only continue to rise as our populations grow—and get older. And as the economies of low- and middle-income countries mature, more leaders are looking to health as a powerful investment, not just for well-being, but for economic development.”

Coming together to set these goals was no small accomplishment.

Their chapter “New Frontiers of Health Access” illustrates the key issues that must be addressed in the next decade if we are to meet our global goals. It covers:

• The evolving profile of the health sector, including global epidemiological changes, new actors in the sector, and the critical role of technology for stronger health systems.
• Obstacles that prevent access to health care, and ways we can overcome them.
• The fit-for-purpose health workforce and what we can learn from the countries that are building them effectively to reach their goals of universal health coverage.
• How health markets can help populations thrive.
• The critical role of health systems research and implementation science in responding directly to the needs of individuals, families, communities, and nations.

Coming together as the international community did to set these major global goals was no small accomplishment.

“Their achievement should have heralded 2016 as the watershed year of international cooperation and the triumph of globalization,” writes A New Global Agenda editor Diana Ayton-Shenker. “It did not. Coinciding with these accomplishments, 2016 ushered in a spate of political upsets and civil erosion reflecting a groundswell of populism, nationalism, and anti-globalization.”

This historic turmoil makes the subject of A New Global Agenda even more timely and critical. As the global health and development communities work to make progress on the major issues of our time—including health, energy, the environment, and information—we need big ideas like the ones covered in A New Global Agenda more than ever.

Meet Diana Ayton-Shenker at SwitchPoint 2018, April 26 & 27, or at the New York City book launch today, March 1. A New Global Agenda: Priorities Practices & Pathways of the International Community is published by Rowman & Littlefield.