President of the World Health Assembly,
Honourable ministers,
Distinguished delegates,
Ladies and gentlemen
President, congratulations on your appointment. We are confident that under your guidance, this will be a successful Assembly.
I speak on behalf of the Pacific island nations.
Healthy Islands vision
The Pacific Health Ministers have been united through a ‘Healthy Islands Vision’ that was coined twenty years ago, and we reaffirmed our commitment to the same vision again this year.
Our vision is of the Pacific as a place where:
- children are nurtured in body and mind;
- environments invite learning and leisure;
- people work and age with dignity;
- ecological balance is a source of pride; and
- the ocean, which sustains us, is protected.
Over the past 20 years, we have made some progress in many areas such as infectious disease control, polio, child survival and life expectancy. However rates of improvement are a cause of concern.
Challenges that test the resilience of our health systems
We face the challenges of increasing and ageing populations.
New diseases such as Chikungunya have emerged.
We have addressed disease outbreaks in the past that have tested the resilience of our health systems.
We have two major challenges that face us today in the Pacific. Non-communicable diseases such as diabetes is the highest in the world, shortening the lives of our people. We know about tsunamis in the Pacific, but this NCD tsunami is like nothing we have ever seen.
We fight the challenge of ever intensifying natural disasters such as cyclones and flooding, the recent Cyclone Pam devastated Vanuatu and impacted Solomon Islands and Kiribati.
Climate change and natural disasters are our second great tsunami. Some of our Pacific Island nations are now battling to remain above the sea level. Whole villages and plantations are being invaded by the sea and contaminating drinking water.
This is a battle we cannot win on our own. Work is required upstream. We call upon the major countries in the world to take heed of the meeting in December that will focus on climate change. We plead with you to take some action—to make use of this last chance to do something about climate change, or we will lose some Pacific nations to climate change.
Pacific working together can build resilient health systems
National health systems must be efficient to respond to public health events. We are small countries so we know also that we need to strengthen ourselves as a group to address these public health events.
We already have some developments along these lines in terms of tertiary services and development of health workers. We need to address the need to grow laboratory services.
An example of building resilient health systems in the Pacific is the development of technical networks such as the Pacific Public Health Surveillance Network (PPHSN).
Governance and Accountability build resilient health systems
Governance and accountability are important. The Pacific Health Ministers have pledged to exercise ministerial leadership to actively engage country leadership in implementing the Healthy Islands vision. The additional mechanism of the Heads of Health operationalizes the vision and the progress to achieving the International Health Regulations (IHR 2015).
Pacific island countries are strengthening health systems through improving disease surveillance systems, environmental health services, border control and encouraging a multisectoral approach to implementing the IHR (2005).
We need the structures and mechanisms to make sure that visions become more than just visions ---but that they become reality. We have established the structures to do this.
We look to developing solid monitoring and evaluation to help us get there and keep us on track.
Conclusion
As Pacific island Nations we will focus on our national systems, and we will work together to develop regional responses to strengthen both national and regional health systems.
We appreciate the role played by Secretariat of the Pacific Community and WHO on this.
We appreciate the role played by development partners.
We give our total support for the proposed SDGs on health and the inclusion of NCDs.
We stress again the need for nations to take heed of the impact of climate change and urge proactive action by large countries that can make an impact on this to do so, as the very survival of many Pacific island states depends upon it.
Thank you.