Can critical thinking help on the path to universal health coverage?
Achieving universal health coverage (UHC) is one of our biggest challenges. Unlike rocket science or brain surgery, both challenging but achievable, we’re yet to build a system that truly includes everyone. Poverty, location, and inequality remain stubborn barriers. Making health for all a reality demands bold action, dynamic solutions, and systems thinking. And to top it off, we're tackling this in a global health landscape where talking about and confronting inequities is like a game of Taboo™!
Critical thinking is the ability to take in information, question assumptions, appraise evidence, and make well-informed decisions. Applied to health system strengthening, this means analysing policies, questioning inequities, challenging the status quo and being prepared to think (and potentially act) dynamically. It's not about accepting simple solutions but instead, rigorously assessing what works and for whom and questioning why.
Health systems are interconnected networks of people, policies, and resources. Systems thinking helps us see the bigger picture – how different factors, from governance to community engagement, cultural drivers to differing and contradicting goals and agendas across sectors, all interact and influence outcomes. It enables us to identify bottlenecks and collaboratively design solutions that address root causes rather than just symptoms.
Fostering strong critical and systems thinking skills among health workers, researchers and policy makers, the ‘software’ of a complex adaptive system, becomes essential if health systems are to progress to meet the UHC challenge.
Interested in pursuing more equitable health systems and developing your skills? The Nossal Institute for Global Health offers a suite of post graduate elective courses with critical and systems thinking at their core. These highly collaborative and engaging courses include, Primary Health Care: Applied Principles (Feb), Pandemic Preparedness and Response (Jul), Comparative Health Systems (Aug) Primary Health Care, Jamkhed, India (Nov).
Contact us or find out more in the 2025 course book!
Dr Daniel Strachan, co-lead of Nossal’s Equitable Systems for Health unit, is a social scientist whose research aims to support more equitable and effective health system development (and ultimately healthier communities) through engagement with community perspectives and approaches to health. He coordinates the ‘Primary Health Care: Applied Principles’ and co-coordinates the ‘Primary Health Care, Jamkhed, India’ elective courses within the University of Melbourne’s MPH program.