Building Social Participation in Health
On May 28th the first National Health Forum, “Building Social Participation in Health” was held in San Salvador, El Salvador with the participation of around 3,000 people from around the country.
The Government of El Salvador’s Health Policy for 2009-2014 includes, among other areas relevant to citizen participation in health, the creation of a National Health Forum for the purpose of making consensus-based decisions for the development of a National Health
System based on the right to health, universal coverage, inclusion, quality and civic engagement.
The Forum’s structure is based on a national Organizing Committee and a permanent regional structure to facilitate its activities.
Strategic Objectives of the National Health Forum
- Territorial Citizen Participation (community participation). Facilitate territorial citizen participation through tiered regional consultations (public hearings) with local actors, basically from civil society, which converge in a large-scale national conference to strengthen, accompany and manage the process for the transformation and integration of the national health system.
- Sectoral Citizen Participation. Identify and facilitate the participation of the different institutions, organizations and individuals involved in the different issues selected according to the health policy’s strategies. These sectors will be consulted separately in thematic roundtable discussions that will then converge at a consensus-building roundtable that will bring a consensus-based position to the national health conference.
- Advocacy. Identify, integrate and mobilize the country’s social and political forces to bring about the conditions that make the transformation of the health system viable, to the benefit of the Salvadoran people, and to influence through advocacy all public policies that affect health and its determinants.
The Forum is seen as an ongoing consultation entity for supporting democratic decisions on health, which will be responsible for, among other things, organizing through tiered, progressive consultations, national health conferences with broad representation, and intensive prior work with civil society and civil society organizations (CSOs).
We share with you the Declaration of the Forum, and links to a video about the Process of the Territorial fora, and a phographic report of the event.
We congratulate our colleagues from the People's Health Movement in El Salvador, especially, Dra. Maria Isabel Rodriguez, the Minister of Health , Dr. Eduardo Espinosa, Vice Minister of Public Policies in Health, and Margarita Posada, National Coordinator of the Forum.
