Achieving Universal Health Coverage is a main goal of the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) National Health Strategy, and is based on the principles of justice, equity, poverty reduction and the rational use of resources. It requires providing quality health care for all, satisfying individual needs while alleviating the financial burden, on households, especially the poor.
 
Since the development of the national primary healthcare network, scaling up the primary healthcare system and reducing out of pocket payments have been a major goal for the MoPH.  However, the Syrian crisis has placed a large and additional burden on the healthcare system in Lebanon with the primary care system at the frontline.
 
Realizing the urgent need to address the emerging health crisis especially in underserved host communities, the MoPH developed an emergency program aimed at expanding Primary Health Care (PHC) coverage to the uninsured poor in Lebanon.  Accordingly, the MOPH developed a basic benefit package of essential preventive healthcare services (vaccination, screening visits...) and pilot tested this model through the World Bank supported project:

Emergency Primary Healthcare Restoration project (EPHRP) (2016-2019). The US$ 15 Million project targeted 150,000 poor Lebanese identified through the National Poverty Targeting Program (NPTP) developed by the Ministry of Social Affairs. Based on the successful implementation of the EPHRP, the MoPH is scaling up the program through a new Lebanon Health Resilience (LHR) Project.  LHR aims to ‎ increase access to quality health care services to poor Lebanese and displaced Syrians in Lebanon.‎ The main project beneficiaries are as follows:

Restructuring of Lebanese Health Resilience Project
 

Lebanon Health Resilience Project (LHRP) was initiated by the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) in 2017 with the support of the World Bank (WB). LHRP will undergo a restructuring to support the Government Of Lebanon (GOL) to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. The restructuring responds to a request from the GOL dated March 27, 2020 to add a new component to the Project on COVID-19 preparedness and response (Component 4) that will allow for immediate support to assess country preparedness, multi-sectoral response capabilities, and to finance the procurement of medical goods and equipment, and capacity-building and training of health workers and front-line responders. An Environmental and Social Management Framework (ESMF) was prepared for the Project, consulted on, disclosed and cleared by the World Bank (WB) in May 2019 [1]. The WB team requested an update of the ESMF in the form of an addendum that tackles the additional environmental, health and safety measures that need to be considered to cover the environmental and social risks under Component 4.

[1] The ESMF was disclosed as Environmental and Social Safeguard Framework (ESSF). In this document both terms ESMF and ESSF refer to the same report disclosed on May 2019 on the WB website....

Updated Addendum ESMF-LHRP - February 2021
Addendum ESMF-LHRP - July 2020