From 11 to 15 March, Carissa Etienne, director of the Pan American Health Organization and World Health Organization-PAHO/WHO, will be in Paraguay on an official visit.  There, Etienne is set to jointly sign with the Paraguayan president, Mario Abdo Benítez, and the Minister of Health, Julio Mazzoleni, the strategy of cooperation between Paraguay and PAHO for the period 2019-2023. Among the goals of the strategy will be to promote universal access to primary health, as well as stepping up the fight on non-communicable diseases and making medicine purchasing mechanisms more effective. The agreement is to be signed on March 15, at the end of Etienne’s visit, and will be progressively implemented in subsequent months.

Etienne’s visit is mainly to strengthen the strategic cooperation relationship between PAHO/WHO and Paraguay for the 2019-2023 period in terms of access to health. The former, in particular, seeks for Paraguay to acquire and build on mechanisms for improving primary health care, with the aim of making it universal by 2023.

With this objective in mind, the Minister of Health said that “cooperation with PAHO gives the country greater capacity to face health challenges”. He also stated that, along with Etienne, “access to primary health care and more complex matters were discussed as management mechanisms to make the purchase of drugs  more effective”.