The Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research is a welcome initiative of the Global Forum for Health Research. It deals with three important parts of WHO's work:

• stimulating the development of health systems;
• promoting research as a key to improving health;
• and reaching out to the many other partners working in their different ways for international health.

I just want to touch very briefly on each of these key aspects of international health work.

As you are well aware, health systems in rich and poor countries alike have undergone dramatic changes during the last decade. Ministries of Health are now trying to ensure the effective participation of a wide variety of public and private institutions in meeting health needs. National health systems have become more complex. Tools for analysis and decision-making are needed to steer the various players towards their common goals. WHO is supporting this effort by designing a comprehensive framework for assessing the performance of health systems. This will be the subject of our World Health Report 2000, to be published later this year.

The framework provides indices for national health system performance in relation to three goals: improving both the average level of health and its equitable distribution; responding to legitimate public expectations; and ensuring a fair system of payment. The framework will provide policy-makers with a way to judge the performance of their own health systems and compare them to those of other countries, keeping track of change over time. The Alliance can play a useful role in this work by supporting informed debate on national policy with input from international experience.

Research is pivotal to discovering not only new drugs and developing new technologies but also to building the health systems of tomorrow. They need innovative forms of social participation, policy-making, financing and service management. I have given high priority to strengthening health research and we are completely redesigning WHO's own research policy. The Alliance will be very useful for coordinating activities to build up research capacity by focusing particularly on the interface between global and country issues.

Lastly, partnership. The powerful competing interests of today require new forms of leadership. These are likely to depend more on recognizing common aims than on enforcing top-down authority. The Alliance, together with other partnerships such as Roll Back Malaria and Stop TB, can contribute in creative ways to the efforts of WHO and its Member States to establish more effective foundations for leadership in meeting health needs.