Global health and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Global health is a relatively new ‘buzz’ phrase in the international community and means different things to different people and organisations. Global health is defined as the ‘sharing of knowledge, resources and experience across cultures, societies, and international boarders’. The World Health Organization was formed in 1948 with a primary role to direct and co-ordinate international health within the United Nations (UN) system. Between 1949 and 1956, the Soviet Union and other communist countries withdrew from the UN and WHO, resulting in a greater American influence globally. Building on the successes and responding to lessons learnt from the Millennium Development Goals, the UN replaced the programme with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in 2015. The SDGs outlined 17 new ambitious goals and 156 associated targets, which were far more wide-reaching and took account of the inter-dependency between health, financial security, education and environmental damage.