The Future of Disease Control Priorities; Comment on “Disease Control Priorities Third Edition Is Published: A Theory of Change Is Needed for Translating Evidence to Health Policy”

The Disease Control Priorities (DCP) project has substantially influenced national and global health priorities since 1993. DCP’s basic framework involves identification of disease burdens based on premature deaths and disability and application of the most cost-effective interventions to the largest burdens, taking into account local feasibility. The future impact of DCP will need to take into account growing national wealth and needs for endogenous capacity to design and implement evidence-based interventions, the rapid emergence of non-communicable disease (NCD), and the universal health coverage (UHC) agenda. This in turn requires three improvements to the DCP framework: greater local capacity, supported by a global effort to cost health interventions, stronger national and international technical capacity and networks, and the use of direct, versus modelled, mortality data to assign priorities and to assess progress. Properly done, DCP could be as important over the next 25 years as it has been in the past 25 years.