There is optimism that the inclusion of universal health coverage in the Sustainable Development Goals advances its prominence in global and national health policy. However, formulating indicators for Target 3.8 through the Inter-Agency Expert Group on Sustainable Development Indicators has been challenging. Achieving consensus on the conceptual and methodological aspects of universal health coverage is likely to take some time in multi-stakeholder fora compared with national efforts to select indicators.

Physicians' ability to provide care to patients living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in the Eastern Caribbean is influenced by economic constraints, sociocultural norms that govern interpersonal interactions, and the pervasive stigma linked to the disease. Although the economic environment determines national capacity to acquire various treatment and monitoring technologies, Eastern Caribbean physicians respond to practicing in a resource-limited setting by making choices that are influenced by the collectivist ethos that governs interpersonal relationships. Through qualitative interviews, the study finds that the social stigma associated with the disease requires physicians to "go the extra mile" to provide care in ways that allow PLWHA to protect their privacy in small, closely networked societies.

Millennium Development Goal 6 aimed to combat HIV/AIDS, and target 6B specifically focused on universal access to antiretrovirals. Global Millennium Development Goal (MDG) reporting based on national averages missed smaller populations and did not include a human rights viewpoint. Six countries in the Eastern Caribbean that endorsed the 2000 Millennium Declaration that were not included in global UNAIDS estimates were selected for this study. In this paper, physicians in the Eastern Caribbean provide a qualitative assessment of the sixth MDG from a right to health perspective that includes the dimensions of availability, accessibility, acceptability, and quality.

The cost of antiretrovirals is borne by donors in many low- and middle-income countries, including St Lucia. Although donor involvement has facilitated access to antiretrovirals, donor engagement in HIV/AIDS has changed over the years. This paper assesses the affordability of antiretrovirals at the individual level if donors were no longer available to fund the cost of first and second-line antiretrovirals and a prospective third-line regimen. Various conceptions of affordability are reviewed using different assumptions of what is required to maintain a standard of living that would avoid individuals descending into poverty as a result of antiretroviral purchases. These concepts of affordability are operationalized using data from the Household Budgeting Survey conducted in St Lucia in 2005/2006. While there is a range of results for the affordability of first and second-line antiretrovirals depending on which standard of affordability is used, third-line antiretrovirals are unaffordable to more than 80% of the population across the four standards of affordability used - the national poverty line, 50% of median annual consumption, 10% of annual consumption and a proposed reasonable minimum standard.