H4+
The H4+ is a joint effort by United Nations and related agencies and programmes UNAIDS, UNFPA, UNICEF, UN Women, WHO, and the World Bank. Harnessing the collective power of each partner's strengths and capacities, the H4+ works to improve the health of women and children and accelerate progress towards achieving MDGs 4 and 5.
HAART
Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) is the treatment regimen recommended to aggressively suppress viral replication and progress of HIV.
HCG Human Chorionic Gonadotrophin
(HCG) is the hormone secreted by the placenta that is detected in pregnancy tests.
Healthy sexuality
Healthy sexuality is a positive and life-affirming part of being human. It includes knowledge of self, opportunities for healthy sexual development and sexual experience, the capacity for intimacy, an ability to share relationships, and comfort with different expressions of sexuality including love, joy, caring, sensuality, or celibacy. Our attitudes about sexuality, our ability to understand and accept our own sexuality, to make healthy choices and respect the choices of others, are essential aspects of who we are and how we interact with our world.
Health care
Health care includes preventive, curative, and palliative services and interventions delivered to individuals or populations. In most countries these services account for the majority of employment, expenditure, and activities that would be included in the broader health sector or health system (see following entries).
Health education (versus counselling)
Health education is the provision of accurate and appropriately contextualized (e.g. according to age, sex, and culture) information on health, aimed at assisting individuals to make informed choices to improve their health.
Health Financing
How resources are mobilized; allocated and used to deliver health services and achieve results. Key issues, include: what are the best option(s) available to mobilize resources in support of health? how to address financial access and prevent health care costs falling on the poor and vulnerable? How to ensure resources are used equitably, efficiently and sustainably?
Health professional
An individual who is educated in a health discipline and licensed/regulated to practise that discipline; e.g., midwives, nurses, medically qualified doctors and clinical officers.
Health sector
The health sector encompasses organized public and private health services (including those for health promotion, disease prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care), health ministries, health related nongovernmental organizations, health-related community groups, and health-specific professional organizations, as well as institutions that directly provide inputs into the health-care system, such as the pharmaceutical industry and teaching institutions.
Health system
A health system consists of all organizations, people, and actions whose primary intent is to promote, restore, or maintain health. It involves the broad range of individuals, institutions, and actions that help to ensure the efficient and effective delivery and use of products and information for prevention, treatment, care, and support to people in need of these services.
Health System Building Blocks
Developed to support countries to strengthen health systems by targeting key systemic areas that are impacting adversely or impeding the achievement of health results. The six building blocks are: (1) Health services must be efficient, effective and accessible; (2) A sufficient number of qualified staff should be available; (3) Health Information System should produce quality and timely data on health determinants and health systems performance; (4) Access to medicines; vaccines and medical technology must be equitable; (5) Health financing should be adequate to support quality and equitable health services; (6) Strong Leadership and governance of health services.
Health systems strengthening
A process that empowers a health system to deliver effective, safe, and high-quality interventions to those who need them. Areas that require strengthening are typically the service delivery system, health workforce, health information system, systems to guarantee equitable access to health products and technologies, and health financing systems, as well as leadership, governance, and accountability.
Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative
The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC) is a debt relief tool for increasing the funds that countries have available and for ensuring that they are channeled to core human development priorities such as basic health care. The HIPC initiative, created in 1996 by the World Bank and further enhanced in 1999, has already helped some of the poorest nations in the world to free up precious resources for human development that would otherwise have been spent on servicing debt. Fully funded and implemented, the enhanced HIPC initiative has the potential to be an even more powerful tool to allow countries to devote more resources to combating infectious diseases.
HIV
HIV is the virus that weakens the immune system, ultimately leading to AIDS. Since HIV means human immunodeficiency virus, it is redundant to refer to the ‘HIV virus'
Homophobia
Homophobia is fear, rejection, or aversion, often in the form of stigmatising attitudes or discriminatory behaviour, towards homosexuals and/or homosexuality.
Hormonal contraception
The systemic method of contraception based on either a progestagen combined with an oestrogen or a progestagen alone. The methods of delivery include pills (oral contraceptives), injectables, and implants.
Household
A household refers to one or more persons occupying a housing unit.
Human Papilloma Virus (HPV)
The virus that causes genital warts and cervical cancers.
Hymen
A thin membrane that partially covers the entrance of the vagina. Its rupture or absence is not necessarily evidence of sexual activity, as it can rupture from physical activity (e.g. gymnastics).
Hysterectomy
Surgical removal of the uterus.
