developing countries would have access to the information they needed to provide the most effective health care possible with the resources available. The world was at the cusp of the information age: information and communication technologies would mean that lack of access to reliable relevant information would no longer be a barrier to effective health care. Although other factors such as lack of drugs and infrastructure might hinder provision of health care, this would not be the case with information.What then has been achieved in the past 10 years? What have we learnt? And if providing access to reliable information is the single most cost-effective and achievable strategy for sustainable improvement in health care, 2 what steps can we now take to bring us nearer to health information for all (panel)? What has been achieved?Important progress has undoubtedly been made. Information and communication technologies are increasingly available; more and better content is available to a growing number of people, especially those in tertiary hospitals, academic institutions, and urban settings; there are more and better free resources on the internet; there is a larger and wider range of healthinformation support programmes; an international community has evolved that is committed to improving health-care information, with governments and other bodies in developing countries playing an increasingly active part; and politically, access to health-care information has become a key international development issue. Equitable and universal access to health-care information is recognised in the latest draft of WHO's World Report on Knowledge for Better Health 3 as an important part of worldwide strategies to reduce global disparities in health and to achieve the health-related Millennium Development Goals.Progress has been patchy, both geographically (with sub-Saharan Africa generally falling far behind most other regions) and across different health sectors (specialist and academic health care is much better served with information than rural primary care), and overall there is little if any evidence that the majority of health professionals, especially those working in primary health care, are any better informed than they were 10 years ago. The few empirical studies we identified 4-7 and many anecdotal reports suggest that lack of physical access to information (absent, slow, or unreliable internet connectivity, expensive paper, and high subscription cost of products) remains the major barrier to knowledge-based health care in developing countries.However, there are now many successful initiatives that could be extended or replicated. An example is BIREME (http://www.bireme.org), the Latin American Can we achieve health information for all by 2015?Fiona Godlee, Neil Pakenham-Walsh, Dan Ncayiyana, Barbara Cohen, Abel Packer Universal access to information for health professionals is a prerequisite for meeting the Millennium Development Goals and achieving Health for All. However, despite the promises of the informati...

“We're going to run out of people before we run out of money”

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Healthcare provision still has problems hanging over from the apartheid era

Scrap development aid as we know it and give the money to independent pro-poor aid organisations Dan J Ncayiyana emeritus vice emeritus vice chancellor and professor, durban institute of technology, durban 4000, South africa danjn@telkomsa.net Competing interests: none declared. Provenance and peer review: commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.