Self-Care
Health systems are stretched beyond capacity leaving millions of individuals unable to access essential healthcare. Quality self-care increases access to primary health care for everyone, drives health system transformation, and accelerates progress toward universal health coverage.
PSI convenes the most strategic public, private, and civil society stakeholders to design and accelerate scale-up of self-care approaches – contributing our user insights, systems insights, and market shaping experience to bring quality primary healthcare closer to everyone so that no one is left behind.
"At the core of the self-care agenda is a desire to increase consumers’ voice, choice and agency over their health.
As we have witnessed in the COVID-19 pandemic, self-care also helps reduce the burden on strained healthcare systems, making them more resilient."
— Alex Ergo, Director, Health Systems Accelerator
Our Approach
to Self-Care
As defined by the World Health Organization, self-care enables individuals and communities to increase health literacy, exercise greater choice, autonomy, power, and control of their health – and improve their health and well-being, with or without the support of healthcare providers.
Across the PSI global network, we:
Ensuring self-care is responsive to users, endorsed by health system actors, and appropriately financed is essential to achieving universal health coverage.
We work with a diverse group of partners to build political will for self-care through global and country–level engagement of government and civil society. We support more governments to develop national self-care guidelines and to translate guidelines to practice.
We elevate user and market insights to upstream partners to incubate and test new products from self-diagnostics to self-administered contraception, including mapping and prioritizing product and service opportunities across health areas, channels and geographies.
Our approach is tailored to market context to address both demand and supply side constraints to self-care product introduction. We leverage person-centered delivery models, provider behavior change approaches, and new and existing digital solutions to bring care closer to consumers and support the integration of self-care efforts across health areas.
Creating partnerships at the country level with national market actors is essential to supporting the broad uptake of self-care interventions. We work through public, private sector and community channels to introduce self-care innovations and partner with local market actors to transition successful product and service introductions to scalable, sustainable platforms.
While the evidence on self-care is promising, it is limited and needs to be aligned to the needs of a diverse audience, including providers, policymakers, and funders. PSI works to further develop the learning agenda, understand the perceptions and readiness among consumers and providers, and share evidence with relevant stakeholders to guide policy and financing of self-care so that health systems are responsive to consumer voices.
Market shaping for
self-diagnostics
SCTG: Self-Care trailblazer group
Funder: The Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
SELF-CARE
DISC: DELIVERING INNOVATION IN SELF-CARE
Funder: The Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF)
SELF-CARE, SEXUAL & REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH
Scaling self-care
for all
Through targeted initiatives, partnerships, and entry points, PSI commits to advancing self-care and recognizing self-care as a crucial component to achieving universal health coverage.
Help us in our aim to make comprehensive, and dignified healthcare a reality for all by sharing this strategy within your networks.
Our
Experts
Dr. Karin Hatzold
Director, HIV and Tuberculosis and Project Director, STAR
US/South Africa
Abigail Winskell, BS
Project Director, DISC & Nexus
Sarah Onyango
Senior Technical Advisor, Self Care, Health Systems Accelerator
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