Coordination in Global Health and Its Costs

Just as health problems cross borders, they also range widely across the competences of the organizations that have as their aim the provision of health services and the improvement of health outcomes-whether those organizations are international institutions, governments, private-sector bodies, or civil society groups. For any particular problem, multiple organizations may have separate capabilities that when put together might, more efficiently and effectively, solve or ameliorate health problems. While coordination and cooperation among many public and private, international and national, organizations have always been recognized at some level as important, the challenges and opportunities presented today in global health are unique, and hence the coordination imperative has become even greater. As a consequence, experimentation in the structures of organizational cooperation has been considerable. Here, I very briefly focus on three points pertaining to contemporary coordination and cooperation in global health: why it is that the commitment to coordination is greater now than in the past; the variety of organizational means employed for the achievement of such coordination; and the challenges that stem from coordination