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This Report describes the priority interventions that can do most for the health of the poorest billion of the world’s populations. The authors believe that priority health interventions offer a peculiarly effective tool in the fight against poverty.

Key interventions include:

• Skilled birth attendance and focused antenatal care
• Vaccination services
• Improved case management of childhood disease, including malaria
• Measures to control infection with malaria and improve treatment for adults
• Short-course treatment for tuberculosis in a format that ensures that the drugs prescribed are taken Measures to encourage people to stop smoking
• Measures to prevent the spread of HIV and to treat those infected.

All these interventions can be delivered through the close-to-client health system, which encompasses the outreach services, health centres, and local hospitals to which the poor are most likely to have access.

Other components of the report:

• An analysis of the constraints on increasing the provision of interventions through existing health systems, and measures to overcome or alleviate constraints. Among these will be constraints on demand—factors that dissuade or prevent people from taking up services; constraints on delivery—factors that limit the capacity of the health system to supply the appropriate degree of intervention; and overall strategic constraints—issues of policy, governance, and the like.
  

• Estimates of the costs of increased provision of interventions, and of the benefits that could be expected from such spending.

1. The authors arrive at a figure of between US$ 40 billion and US$ 52 billion in increased annual expenditure by 2015 for the cost of strengthening the close-to-client portion of health systems enough to achieve high coverage with the priority interventions.
2.  Since a great deal of the spending would go into strengthening health systems overall, the relation between cost and benefit is strongly nonlinear.

• A summary of the conditions of continued commitment that will be necessary to maintain such levels of effort and maximise their effectiveness.

1. To sustain these unprecedented levels of commitment will require political will.
2. There is a need for research on improving treatments and preventive options (notably vaccines against HIV and malaria).
3. There is also a need for research into how best to deliver interventions, whether they be old or new, and especially how best to deliver them to the poorest groups, and how to encourage communities to embrace their use.
   

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