Table 3 Prominent frames in the strategic documents of the World Health Organization

Global Health as biomedicine

 The biomedical frame appears to be the dominant frame throughout almost all of WHO’s documents, which presents a disease-based conceptualisation of global health, with a focus on interventions within the health sector to reduce burden of specific diseases. Often, the structure of priorities or budget items are based almost exclusively on a biomedical frame, which extends to the very organization of WHO’s departments, which are dominantly structured according to specific disease groups.

Global health as a human rights issue

 Health as a human right features prominently in the WHO constitution [11], which states that “the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition” Global health as a human right appears to be used as an additional justification for programmatic activities, almost always supplementing the biomedical frame. However, the programme budget for 2014–15 allocates very limited resources to the programme area on human rights [45].

Global health as a security issue

 Global health as a security issue is a central and recurrent frame throughout many of WHO’s public documents, with an emphasis on WHO’s role in mitigating and coordinating international responses to disease outbreaks. This frame appears to be of particular importance to re-asserting the uniqueness and added value of WHO. However, it is notable that the security frame is less utilised in the GPW12, apart from references made to the International Health Regulations, and that the programme budget 2014–15 for outbreak and crisis response was cut by 51.4 % compared to the level in 2012–13 [45].

Global health as a means to reduce poverty

 In the GPW11, eradicating extreme poverty is mentioned together with eradicating hunger as “the first and most important Millennium Development Goal”. While poverty reduction’s role in improving public health is acknowledged, the programme documents primarily frame the issue by discussing the role of health policies in contributing to poverty reduction. Indeed, ‘Investing in health to reduce poverty’ was one of the seven priorities for GPW11. The concept of ‘poverty reduction’ appears largely connected to the broader discussion on ‘sustainable development’ in the GPW12.

Rarely used frames

 Global health as a global public good, global health as investing in economic growth, global health as foreign policy and global health as a commodity/trade issue were rarely used frames in the reviewed strategic documents.