By: Staff Writer
October 3, 2025
The Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) in a new report said that the failure to build resilience within primary health care (PHC) in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) could lead to significant preventable losses in both lives and long term economic development
The report, No Time to Wait: Resilience as the Cornerstone of Primary Health Care in Latin America and the Caribbean, was launched on the sidelines of PAHO’s 62nd Directing Council in Washington, D.C., before ministers of health and high-level delegates from across the region.
It said: “The LAC is particularly vulnerable to multiple shocks, including natural, anthropogenic, and climate change-related, which threaten the health and well-being of millions. One significant way these shocks may adversely impact populations is through the interruption of essential services.
“A modelled shock causing a 25–50 percent reduction in primary care coverage with a one-to-five-year recovery period, would result in societal economic costs ranging from US$ 7 billion to more than US$ 37 billion.
“Conservative estimates show that such a disruption could cause between 32,100 and 164,800 additional deaths, corresponding to 600–3100 stillbirths, 300–1400 neonatal deaths, 2000–10,000 child deaths, 2200–11,300 maternal deaths, and 29,000–149,000 non-communicable disease (NCD)-related deaths, plus 2.7–14.1 million unintended pregnancies. Importantly, the region can expect to experience more than one such shock in the coming years, which could have a multiplicative effect.”
The report added: “Given this high cost of inaction for people and economies, the history of underwhelming responses to past public health emergencies, and the region’s high-risk profile for future shocks (e.g., epidemiological and climate-related), the World Bank-PAHO Lancet Regional Health Americas Commission asserts that it is urgent to put resilience as a cornerstone of primary health care (PHC)-based systems.
“The Commission’s work produces three novel contributions to literature. Firstly, it explicitly links the concepts of PHC and resilience, which until recently have mostly been analysed separately. Secondly, it produces a policy framework and actionable policy options linking PHC and resilience for LAC, which could also be considered elsewhere. Thirdly, it models the cost to population health and the economics of inaction on PHC and resilience in LAC.
“The findings of the Commission show that the region will continue to face accelerating threats and more complex shocks that will put further strain on PHC systems. It underscores that the potential cost of inaction is high and without commitment to resilient PHC millions of lives and livelihoods remain at risk and economies already are and will continue to be hard hit but shocks. We present urgent areas that countries can take action on today that work in synergy to build both PHC-based systems and resilience.
The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the region’s vulnerabilities. Despite accounting for just 8.5 percent of the world’s population, Latin America and the Caribbean reported 30 percent of all COVID-19 deaths. Essential services—such as maternal and newborn care, childhood immunization, and chronic disease treatment—fell by up to 50 percent, with gaps that in some countries persisted for two years or more.
The region is also one of the most disaster-prone in the world, facing a rising number of hurricanes, floods, and vector-borne outbreaks. Yet health systems remain heavily hospital-centered, fragmented, and underinvested in PHC.
“Strengthening primary health care is one of the greatest health challenges of Latin America and the Caribbean,” said Jaime Saavedra, Director of Human Development for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank. “The Commission’s report is a roadmap that shows what works to move towards a resilient primary health care. But the hardest part isn’t technical— governments need to place primary health care at the heart of their agendas, invest in it urgently and at scale, and ensure universal coverage so that protecting lives and the economies is not optional but a priority.”