Latin America and the Caribbean has made important progress in expanding health coverage and improving population health over recent decades. The region now faces a more demanding phase: turning coverage into care that is effective, high-quality, equitable and financially sustainable. Countries across the region are confronting a more complex health landscape, shaped by non-communicable diseases, population ageing, persistent infectious threats, and environmental and climate‑related risks. These pressures are hitting health systems still constrained by low spending, high out-of-pocket payments, fragmented coverage, workforce shortages, and uneven infrastructure and digital capacity. Countries need to spend more, but also spend better: improving quality and equity while preserving affordability and long-term sustainability. These challenges are not felt equally. Inequalities in income, geography, education, ethnicity and other social determinants continue to shape who becomes ill, who receives timely and good-quality care, and who faces financial hardship when seeking treatment. This publication shows that national averages often hide large gaps in risks, access, quality, financial protection and outcomes. Making these gaps visible is a necessary step towards making them actionable.
This third edition of Health at a Glance: Latin America and the Caribbean highlights this shift. It brings together comparable evidence on health status, determinants of health, health data and health system infrastructure, expenditure and financing, quality of care, the health workforce, and ageing across 33 countries. It also includes two thematic chapters on issues that are central to the region’s current policy agenda: healthcare quality, and inequalities in health and healthcare. The value of the Health at a Glance series lies not only in assembling these data, but in presenting them in a consistent and accessible way, allowing countries to benchmark progress and learn from variation across health systems. A distinctive feature of this report is that it places Latin America and the Caribbean in dialogue with one another and with OECD health systems. These comparisons are not rankings or a single model to emulate; they are a structured way to identify gaps and draw lessons from systems facing similar pressures related to ageing, chronic disease, quality improvement, digital transformation and financial sustainability.
A common message emerges across these analyses: many countries in the region have built the foundations of broader access, but the next generation of reform must focus on quality. Quality is a system-wide agenda, spanning governance, regulation, patient safety, evidence‑based care, workforce capability, data systems, financing incentives and integrated, people‑centred services, with the needs of underserved populations in mind.
At a time of tight fiscal constraints and rising demand for care, better policy choices depend on better evidence. By combining robust indicators with policy analysis, this publication aims to support governments, practitioners and researchers in identifying priorities, benchmarking progress, and learning from experiences across the region. The evidence presented here can help countries ask not only how to mobilise more resources for health, but also how to use them better.
The OECD, the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank are pleased to collaborate on this third regional edition. Together, they aim to support countries in using data and policy dialogue to advance reforms that are technically sound, financially realistic and responsive to people’s needs. We hope this report will contribute to informed policy dialogue and to the shared effort of building health systems in Latin America and the Caribbean that are not only broader in coverage, but stronger in quality, fairness and sustainable over time.