Minister of Health and Mass Media Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa used Sri Lanka’s address to the 79th World Health Assembly in Geneva to mark a century of the country’s public health system and to lay out a primary-care reform agenda built around community wellness centres, with a separate side-session intervention pressing the case for lifelong care for childhood-cancer survivors.
In his country statement on the theme “Leave No One Behind,” Jayatissa said Sri Lanka had reached remarkable health outcomes despite limited resources, citing falls in maternal and child mortality, the elimination of malaria, control of communicable diseases, high immunisation coverage and rising life expectancy. But he warned that the rapid rise of non-communicable diseases, an ageing population and growing mental-health needs were creating “new and complex challenges” the existing system was not built for.
He told delegates Sri Lanka had embarked on an “ambitious primary healthcare reform agenda” through the rollout of Arogya health and wellness centres — community-based units led by family doctors with multidisciplinary teams. Forty-one centres are operational, with the target raised to 300 by the end of this year and 450 in 2027. The reform programme prioritises early detection of NCDs and common cancers, alongside elderly care, rehabilitation, palliative care, home-based services, adolescent health and primary mental healthcare.
In a separate session on May 18 titled “Measuring survival, driving change — Advancing equity through the WHO Global Initiative for Childhood Cancer,” Jayatissa argued that survival rates were not the only benchmark for success. “The true measure of success in childhood cancer is not only how many children survive, but how they live,” he told the session, calling for follow-up care that extended through primary healthcare, schools, families and communities. The session coincided with the WHO’s launch of its global report providing country-level five-year survival estimates for lymphoid leukaemia in children and adolescents.
The 79th World Health Assembly opened on May 18 and runs until May 23 under the broader theme “One World for Health.” Jayatissa’s Geneva engagements follow his speech to the Commonwealth Health Ministers’ meeting on May 17 outlining Sri Lanka’s cancer-control plan, and come after a string of domestic policy interventions on non-communicable disease management and the persistent migration of haemato-oncology specialists from Sri Lanka’s cancer services.
