DOHA, Qatar — Dr. Hanan Balkhy warned global leaders at the Doha Forum last week that wars and economic shocks are battering Middle East health systems, leaving routine care harder to find and emergency care harder to sustain. Her message comes as a new WHO-World Bank global monitoring report estimates 4.6 billion people worldwide still lack access to essential health services and 2.1 billion experience financial hardship to get care, Dec. 13, 2025.
Hanan Balkhy, the World Health Organization’s regional director for the Eastern Mediterranean, says that global crisis is magnified where conflict turns clinics into front lines: supply chains fracture, staff flee and hospital corridors fill with trauma cases. In an October address in Cairo, Hanan Balkhy said the region “meets amid profound uncertainty” and that hospitals, “once safe havens,” have become “sites of violence” — a warning paired with her call that regional solidarity is “not optional,” according to WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean office.
Hanan Balkhy: what the 2025 report says
The new tracking focuses on two blunt questions: Can people get the services they need, when they need them? And does paying for care drive households into poverty? The report finds service coverage has improved since 2000, but progress has slowed since 2015 — leaving the biggest holes in crisis zones and among the poorest families.
Coverage has improved: The service coverage index rose from 54 to 71 between 2000 and 2023.
The access gap is still massive: In 2023, 4.6 billion people still lacked full access to essential services.
Costs still punish families: In 2022, 2.1 billion people experienced financial hardship tied to out-of-pocket spending.
Those figures align with WHO’s updated universal health coverage fact sheet, which warns the world is off-track for the 2030 goal and flags medicines as a major driver of out-of-pocket costs in many countries.
Financing is the next fault line
Health officials say the next battle is predictable funding — not just emergency appeals. The World Bank says five-year “National Health Compacts” can help countries expand primary care, improve affordability and shore up health workforces as part of its goal to help deliver quality, affordable services to 1.5 billion people by 2030, according to a World Bank press release.
Speaking in Doha, Hanan Balkhy urged governments, donors and industry to shift from pledges to practical collaboration. “There are major opportunities, and I think we just need to start pushing for them, talking about them, and sharing them,” she said during a Doha Forum panel, as reported by Gulf Times.
The warning has been building for years
In 2023, WHO and the World Bank warned that progress had stalled, reporting that in 2021 about 4.5 billion people were not fully covered by essential health services, according to a joint news release ahead of the U.N. high-level meeting on UHC.
And the norm that health care should be protected in war is hardly new: The U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 2286 in 2016, condemning attacks on medical facilities and personnel and urging accountability.
But conflict spillover keeps exposing the gaps. In June 2024, Balkhy said the Gaza war’s “ripple effect” was straining nearby health systems, with thousands of patients needing evacuation for specialized care, according to Reuters.
Hanan Balkhy’s message now is blunt: universal health coverage cannot be built on rubble. With five years left before 2030, she is pressing governments and donors to protect health care, stabilize financing and invest fast in primary care — before the next shock breaks what’s still standing.
