Hon’ble Ministers,
Director-General Dr Tedros,
Distinguished delegates, colleagues and friends,
My sincere gratitude for a very rich, very thoughtful discussion.
We have heard both the scale of the challenge before us and the remarkable range of solutions already being pursued across our Region.
Over the past decade, the South-East Asia Region has made extraordinary progress in expanding its health workforce.
Since 2014, the density of doctors, nurses and midwives has increased by around 70%.
Today, our Region has one of the largest capacities in the world for producing health professionals.
And yet, as we have heard, this progress has not yet translated equally into access to specialized care.
Critical shortages remain in many specialties.
Specialists are too often concentrated in capitals, tertiary and super specialty hospitals, and in the private sector.
This leaves poor, rural, remote and underserved communities struggling to access the care they need.
Migration and movement from rural to urban areas, from developing to developed countries, and from the public to the private sector, place further pressure on already scarce capacity.
Our challenge, therefore, is not simply to produce more health workers. It is to ensure that the right skills are available in the right places, responding to the health needs of our populations.
The experiences you have shared, hon’ble ministers, show that there are many ways to get there.
Three priorities have emerged clearly from your discussion.
First, we need to align our health workforce with changing population needs.
Our populations are ageing. Noncommunicable diseases are rising. Demand for cancer care, cardiovascular care, mental health services, rehabilitation, emergency and critical care, and other specialized services will continue to grow.
For effective workforce planning, education and investment, we must therefore ask not only how many specialists we require, but which skills we need, where we need them, and how best to organize services so that they reach everyone.
Second, we must make better use of the capacity we already have.
As hon’ble ministers have shared, this can take many forms: strengthening family medicine and multidisciplinary teams; enabling safe and appropriately governed task-sharing; improving gatekeeping, referral and continuity of care; and finding new ways to share scarce specialist capacity across geographic and administrative boundaries.
Importantly, it also means embracing the opportunities offered by telemedicine, digital health and artificial intelligence – safely, responsibly and equitably – to bring expertise closer to people who might otherwise go without it, and freeing the time of specialists from routine work.
And here, I want to emphasize: Innovation must extend quality care, not create a lower standard of care for people living in underserved communities.
Third, we must work together.
Many of the challenges we have discussed today do not stop at national borders.
Health-worker migration, professional regulation, new models of training, rapidly evolving technologies and the development of specialist capacity all present opportunities for countries to learn from one another and to act together.
We should not require every Member State to solve the same problems alone.
The proposed regional network of health professional regulators and policy makers can provide an important platform for that cooperation – enabling us to share evidence and experience, strengthen regulatory capacity, learn from successful innovations and build solutions together.
Finally, throughout this discussion, one point has been particularly clear.
There is no choice to be made between strong primary health care and equitable access to specialized care.
Rather, they are mutually dependent parts of the same health system.
Strong primary health care enables prevention and early detection, provides first-contact care, ensures appropriate referral and supports continuity of care.
Strong specialist services provide the expertise people need when their health needs become more complex.
Our task is to connect them.
In this sense, Dili builds directly on Delhi. The commitments we made through the 2023 Delhi Declaration to strengthen primary health care are carried forward today as we seek to ensure that specialized care is accessible to everyone who needs it.
Because ultimately, equity in specialized care will be measured not by the number of specialists we train or the technologies we deploy.
It will be measured by whether a woman facing an obstetric emergency, a person living with cancer, a child requiring surgery, or a family living far from a major city can get quality care when they need it.
That is the shared promise at the heart of the Dili Declaration.
WHO stands ready to support every Member State in turning that promise into action – through technical assistance, stronger regional collaboration, knowledge exchange and our collective commitment to Health for All.
I thank all Member States for the experiences, innovations and priorities shared today, and I extend my utmost gratitude to the Government of Timor-Leste for bringing us together around this important commitment.
Thank you.