Person:
Almeida, Gisele

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Last updated: January 31, 2023
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Gisele Almeida is an advisor in Health Systems and Services Analysis and coordinator of the EquiLAC Project at the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization in Washington, DC, where she provides technical cooperation on monitoring and evaluation processes, use of evidence in public policies, and assessment of health systems performance. She has extensive expertise in health systems research, health services management tools, evaluation methods, and project management. She received a doctor of public health with specialization in health policy and a master of science in information management from the George Washington University. She has published in books and peer-reviewed journals.
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    Toward Universal Health Coverage and Equity in Latin America and the Caribbean: Evidence from Selected Countries
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015-06-11) Dmytraczenko, Tania; Almeida, Gisele; Dmytraczenko, Tania; Almeida, Gisele
    This volume reviews progress in reducing inequalities in health outcomes, service utilization, and financial protection, and assesses the common trends emerging from these reforms.
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    Assessing Latin America’s Progress Toward Achieving Universal Health Coverage
    (Project HOPE, 2015-10) Buisman, Leander R.; Wagstaff, Adam; Eozenou, Patrick Hoang-Vu; Dmytraczenko, Tania; Almeida, Gisele; Cercone, James; Díaz, Yadira; Maceira, Daniel; Bredenkamp, Caryn; Molina, Silvia; Mori Sarti, Flávia; Paraje, Guillermo; Ruiz, Fernando; Scott, John; Valdivia, Martin; Werneck, Heitor
    Two commonly used metrics for assessing progress toward universal health coverage involve assessing citizens’ rights to health care and counting the number of people who are in a financial protection scheme that safeguards them from high health care payments. On these metrics most countries in Latin America have already “reached” universal health coverage. Neither metric indicates, however, whether a country has achieved universal health coverage in the now commonly accepted sense of the term: that everyone—irrespective of their ability to pay—gets the health services they need without suffering undue financial hardship. We operationalized a framework proposed by the World Bank and the World Health Organization to monitor progress under this definition and then constructed an overall index of universal health coverage achievement. We applied the approach using data from 112 household surveys from 1990 to 2013 for all twenty Latin American countries. No country has achieved a perfect universal health coverage score, but some countries (including those with more integrated health systems) fare better than others. All countries except one improved in overall universal health coverage over the time period analyzed.
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    Health-System Reform and Universal Health Coverage in Latin America
    (Elsevier, 2015) Atun, Rifat; Monteiro de Andrade, Luiz Odorico; Almeida, Gisele; Cotlear, Daniel; Dmytraczenko, T
    Starting in the late 1980s, many Latin American countries began social sector reforms to alleviate poverty, reduce socioeconomic inequalities, improve health outcomes, and provide financial risk protection. In particular, starting in the 1990s, reforms aimed at strengthening health systems to reduce inequalities in health access and outcomes focused on expansion of universal health coverage, especially for poor citizens. In Latin America, health-system reforms have produced a distinct approach to universal health coverage, underpinned by the principles of equity, solidarity, and collective action to overcome social inequalities. In most of the countries studied, government financing enabled the introduction of supply-side interventions to expand insurance coverage for uninsured citizens—with defined and enlarged benefits packages—and to scale up delivery of health services. Countries such as Brazil and Cuba introduced tax-financed universal health systems. These changes were combined with demand-side interventions aimed at alleviating poverty (targeting many social determinants of health) and improving access of the most disadvantaged populations. Hence, the distinguishing features of health-system strengthening for universal health coverage and lessons from the Latin American experience are relevant for countries advancing universal health coverage.