After landmark meeting, leading health organizations reinforce their support for countries to integrate medical oxygen into health system planning

The first-ever World Health Organization (WHO) Road to Oxygen Access meeting concluded on 16 May 2024 in Dakar, Senegal, bringing together 63 Member States as well as UN agencies, nongovernmental organizations, donors and academic experts. This meeting marks a significant milestone in the journey to achieving universal access to medical oxygen and improving health outcomes for patients. 

Members of the Global Oxygen Alliance (GO₂AL), a partnership that includes around 20 health partners, including representatives from civil society and affected communities, call on ministries of health, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to reinforce their commitment to integrating medical oxygen into their national health system planning. GO₂AL also calls on donors, industry partners and civil society to support greater access to medical oxygen.  

At the WHO Road to Oxygen Access meeting, participants agreed on the scope and content of a new oxygen planning template that provides a clear, actionable way forward for all stakeholders to help ensure that oxygen is an integral part of health systems everywhere. This demonstrates Member States’ commitment to advancing the resolution adopted by all 194 Member States at the World Health Assembly (WHA) one year ago, which outlined critical steps that must be taken by governments to increase access to medical oxygen.  

Medical oxygen is a lifesaving essential medicine without substitute, used to treat both acute and chronic respiratory illnesses, including COVID-19 and pneumonia. It is essential for surgery, trauma, emergency, critical care, and for treating older people, pregnant women with obstetric complications and newborns and children in respiratory distress; and can support the management of opportunistic infections due to advanced HIV infection and severe forms of tuberculosis and malaria, as well as non-communicable diseases. 

Nearly 25 million deaths arise each year from conditions that require medical oxygen—demonstrating the urgent need to enhance access. Access to quality medical oxygen is a critical element of seven of the nine targets¹ in Sustainable Development Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being and is essential to achieve universal health coverage. However, less than half of the health facilities in low- and middle-income countries have consistent access, indicating a significant gap that, if addressed, could prevent many deaths.  

“Access to safe, reliable, quality medical oxygen is a must, for standard universal health care delivery, as well as for emergency preparedness,” says Dr Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme and Deputy Director-General of WHO. “Clearly a lot has been accomplished in recent years to increase access to medical oxygen. However, more is needed to ensure that our global, regional and national policies include oxygen.” 

To help countries integrate medical oxygen into broader health system planning, Member States and partners at the Road to Oxygen Access meeting came to a consensus on the critical components of a National Oxygen Scale-up Template for developing and operationalizing evidence-based, inclusive, and costed national plans.  This template underscores the importance of understanding the existing context, policy environment and medical oxygen need in a country and then outlining the appropriate objectives, governance and coordination structures as well as implementation, monitoring and costing mechanisms to build a comprehensive and sustainable national oxygen ecosystem. 

One of GO₂AL’s primary objectives, set out in its 2024-2030 strategy, is to improve the capacity of countries to plan, finance, access, implement and use oxygen at all levels of the health system.  

“What successful country planning and implementation means—what this meeting was all about—is having effective costed plans and strategies to drive the mobilization of appropriate resources, to structure the right interventions and to then gain more efficiencies and cost-effectiveness nationally, regionally and globally for oxygen scale-up,” says Robert Matiru, Director of Programmes at Unitaid and Co-Chair of GO₂AL.  

This co-developed template will serve as a valuable resource for GO₂AL and its partners to support countries in this endeavor. 

“It was very interesting to see all these people meeting is one place to develop a framework that speaks to oxygen needs, not only for Zambia, but the world,” says Tiyezye Joseph Mphande, the National Oxygen Coordinator at the Ministry of Health in Zambia, who attended the meeting. “And it gives us the motivation to work harder and to see how we can scale our work in this space for oxygen.”  

Closing the oxygen access gap and strengthening oxygen systems will require an integrated set of solutions and investments—as outlined in the resolution. National plans for oxygen scale-up provide a framework to do just this. 

In the lead-up to the 77^th World Health Assembly and beyond, GO₂AL members call for:  

1. Member states to prioritize oxygen in their health plans and budgets – including the development of their own costed national oxygen road maps;  

2. Donors, development finance institutions, the Pandemic Fund and other funders to continue to finance the necessary support for countries to develop and implement their oxygen road maps; and 

3. Civil society to stress the urgency of scaling up oxygen systems and hold governments and the global community accountable to the oxygen resolution.  

To advance country progress by the WHO Executive Board meeting in 2026, GO₂AL and its members will continue to work with all stakeholders to advance efforts to provide coordinated technical assistance and training, strengthen regional networks and secure diversified financing options for more sustainable oxygen systems. By achieving these goals, we can ensure every patient receives the appropriate respiratory care when and where they need it. 

About GO₂AL: 

During the COVID-19 pandemic in February 2021, amidst widespread global oxygen shortages, the world’s leading health agencies created the Oxygen Emergency Taskforce as part of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-Accelerator). The taskforce raised more than US$1 billion to boost access to medical oxygen, expand production, negotiate for better pricing, and provide technical advice to governments. As the world transitioned from the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and prepares for future health threats, the ACT-Accelerator Oxygen Emergency Taskforce evolved in May 2023 into the Global Oxygen Alliance (GO₂AL), a broader partnership to convert the investments made during the pandemic into lives saved and to expand the work started by the taskforce. 

GO₂AL is hosted by Unitaid, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). It is co-chaired by Unitaid and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (The Global Fund) and vice-chaired by the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). GO₂AL members include the Access to Medicine Foundation; Africa CDC; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Build Health International; the Clinton Health Access Initiative; the Every Breath Counts Coalition; PAHO, Partners In Health; PATH; Save the Children; The Global Fund, UNICEF; Unitaid; UNOPS; the United States Agency for International Development; WHO, the World Bank; and representatives from civil society and affected communities.