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Date: 07 August 2025

Time: 11:00 - 13:00 p.m. (EDT)

Simultaneous interpretation in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, Spanish, and 

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Background

Self-care interventions are among the most promising approaches to address the challenges of accessing affordable, acceptable, and quality health services today. By recognizing individuals as active agents in managing their health, self-care interventions, such as self-pregnancy testing, self-administration of injectable contraceptives, and self-monitoring of blood pressure and glucose levels, offer opportunities to strengthen primary health care as part of comprehensive and integrated care throughout people's lives . 
Self-care interventions could be added as additional options to health center-based care without increasing the financial burden on health systems or out-of-pocket expenses for individuals, while systematically addressing the access and equity considerations that disproportionately affect underserved individuals and communities.

The magnitude of humanitarian crises, exacerbated by the shortage of qualified health workers, poses a direct threat to progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and universal health coverage (UHC), highlighting the need to reinforce the considerable opportunities that self-care interventions offer to the global public health community. Self-care interventions offer a strategy to improve universal health coverage, promote and sustain health actions carried out by users and their families, reaching people in situations of greater vulnerability, supporting the actions of health workers and systems. 

24 June marks the start of Self-Care Month, which ends with Self-Care Day on 24 July. This symbolic day was chosen because self-care can be practiced “24 hours a day/7 days a week”. 

It has been six years since the World Health Organization (WHO), published the first Global Guideline on Self-Care Interventions for Health and Well-being, which paved the way for connecting communities, primary care, and health systems. Since then, WHO has released many additional resources to support countries in implementing self-care interventions and making health care more accessible to all. During Self-Care Month 2025, WHO will launch several more materials, including a digital adaptation kit on blood pressure self-monitoring during pregnancy; Spanish versions of Volumes 1, 2, and 3 of the Self-Care Competency Framework to help health and care workers support individuals in self-care; and the Spanish edition of the guideline “Implementing Self-Care Interventions for Health and Well-being: A Systems Approach.” WHO will also continue to promote key resources such as the Guideline and the WHO Academy’s free training course on contraceptive counselling and prescribing in pharmacies, available in Spanish, French, English, and Chinese.

This virtual meeting follows up on the regional meeting held in October 2024 in Bogotá, Colombia, where the concept of "self-care" in sexual and reproductive health and its implications for potentially accelerating the reduction of maternal mortality were addressed. Recommended interventions by WHO, which were already successfully implemented in the region and others that could begin to be developed, were identified. With the participation of representatives from the Ministries of Health of 12 countries in the region, some of them were prioritized in the need to accelerate the reduction of maternal death, and a toolkit developed by WHO and �����鶹��Ʒ for this implementation was presented. Each country's team has prepared an action plan to improve the implementation of self-care in priority areas. It also serves as preparation for the upcoming in-person meeting on self-care in Sexual and Reproductive Health to be held at the end of 2025.

General objective of the webinar

• Share the progress made in the Action Plan for self-care interventions in prioritized countries to accelerate the reduction of maternal death.
  Specific Objectives of the Meeting

Specific objectives

• Share progress in self-care experiences in Latin American and Caribbean countries, including innovations, best practices, and evidence-based approaches.
• Deepen training in the tools proposed by WHO for the implementation of self-care interventions, policies, and strategies, sustainable implementation at scale.
• Define and agree on collaboration mechanisms, facilitate networking, and provide opportunities for future collaborations and coalitions among key actors working on self-care interventions in the region.