In 2016, the world will be moving from the Millenium Development Goals (MDG) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Regarding health-related goals, most of the funding in recent years has been focusing on disease-specific programmes and strengthening primary care; nevertheless, public health, health promotion, prevention, and controlling risk factors through a broad range of policy interventions, both within and outside the health sector, must be an important focus in the era of SDGs.

In this post, integrated health services are seen as a main factor to achieve the health-related topics in the SDGs. The author defends not only strong primary care services to deliver broad quality care, but also that these services should be integrated with essential hospital services. The article emphasizes that this kind of integration would be even more important in countries with a weak health system, in order to build a strong system that could face the future health challenges through integrated health services.