HIFA sends our best wishes and thanks to Richard Fitton and other HIFA colleagues attending the UN World Data Forum in Hangzhou which starts today. We look forward to welcome new members, including from China.
Below are extracts from a news item about the event on the United Nations website, and a comment from me.
UN Data Forum: Fast-tracking solutions to reach the SDGs
https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/04/1135962
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has issued a major call at a UN forum to find new ways to harness data today, to shape a peaceful and prosperous tomorrow, for all people and the planet.
The 2023 UN World Data Forum will focus on core issues related to the following four themes:
- Data provides the insight we need to ensure a sustainable and safer future for all.
- Partnerships and innovation are key to data equality and ensuring that no one is left behind.
- We all have a responsibility to ensure data and statistics are used ethically to protect privacy and data rights.
- Resilient national data ecosystems need support, including sustainable funding, to ensure they are fit for the future, and everyone benefits.
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COMMENT (NPW): The aim of the UN World Data Forum is 'to spur data innovation, nurture partnerships, mobilize high-level political and financial support for data, and build a pathway to better data for sustainable development'. Robust data are the building blocks for reliable healthcare information. The creation, exhange and use of reliable healthcare information (global evidence ecosystem) represent the pathway from better data *to* the progressive realisation of universal health coverage and sustainable development. The need to strengthen the global evidence ecosystem is the rationale for HIFA, as described in The Lancet in 2004: https://www.hifa.org/about-hifa/hifa-vision-mission-strategy I expect this UN World Data Forum to be looking not only at systems to produce and govern better data but also on measures to strengthen the application of such data: the global evidence ecosystem. The availability of robust data and the availability and use of reliable healthcare information based on such data are inseparable.
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org