Health System Responsiveness

WHO's work on health systems responsiveness aims to develop the technical tools to assess, monitor and raise awareness of how people are treated and the environment in which they are treated when seeking health care. It upholds, as part of the Equity Team, a particular focus on inequitable treatment associated with social status. It aims to develop the associated norms and standards for assessing responsiveness, in particular focusing on the use of user-oriented questionnaires.

The concept of responsiveness was developed as part of WHO's broader conceptual framework on health systems developed in 2000, which identified three focuses for health system goals: health, responsiveness and financing fairness (World Health Report 2000). The framework's underlying reasoning behind including responsiveness was that as a social system, the health system, like other social systems (e.g. justice, education), was expected by its populations to meet a core goal plus, common social goals expected of all social systems, in addition to their main aim.