title: Vertical interventions and system effects; have we learned anything from past experiences?
abstract: The recent Ebola Virus Outbreak had a devastating effect on West Africa's already feeble national health systems. We suggest that such an impact turned out to be catastrophic because it hit particularly hard human resources for health and the delivery of primary healthcare services, which are cross-sectional to any health system. National and international interventions failed to understand the nature of this interaction, and concentrated on attending urgent specific vertical functions to fight the outbreak--the pillars--such as surveillance, logistics, safe burials etc. Such patchwork and vertical intervention strategy was always going to fail to tackle a system-wide problem, particularly in already fragile systems. We suggest that future interventions will have to learn from the experience of past initiatives for the introduction of HIV-AIDS services, which started as vertical programs and ended up including ever growing health system strengthening components.
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal.
authors.forename: Charlotte
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Oliveira
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal ; Global Health and Tropical Medicine, Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal.
authors.forename: Giuliano
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Russo
mesh_terms: D000354:Africa, Western; D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration* / Q000639:trends; D004196:Disease Outbreaks; D015658:HIV Infections / Q000628:therapy; D019142:Hemorrhagic Fever, Ebola / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000517:prevention & control*; D006801:Humans; D011320:Primary Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration* / Q000639:trends
keywords: Ebola Outbreak Response; global health initiatives; vertical interventions