WHO Unveils Framework to Integrate Traditional and Biomedical Care in Health Systems

The WHO framework outlines four models for integrating traditional, complementary and integrative medicine into national health systems, emphasizing equity, cultural respect and evidence-based practice. It offers countries a structured tool to assess their current approach and strengthen collaboration between TCIM and biomedical care for more people-centred health systems.

The WHO Global Traditional Medicine Centre, working closely with experts from the University of Toronto and other international research institutions, presents a new conceptual framework that reshapes how traditional, complementary, and integrative medicine (TCIM) can be embedded into national health systems. The report emerges amid renewed global commitment, from Alma-Ata to the 2023 UN Political Declaration on Universal Health Coverage, to recognizing TCIM as a vital part of everyday health-seeking behaviour. Despite its widespread use, TCIM has long suffered from vague terminology, uneven regulation, and fragmented integration, prompting the WHO to propose a unified approach to understanding how countries weave these systems into mainstream care.

Defining Integration Beyond Coexistence

Central to the document is a precise definition of “integration,” framed as the organized, financed, and managed delivery of equitable, culturally respectful, and evidence-based TCIM and biomedical care across the health continuum. Rather than treating TCIM as an optional add-on, the definition positions it as integral to people-centred health systems. Yet the report is equally clear that integration must not compromise Indigenous knowledge systems or enable misappropriation. It anchors its guidance in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and global treaties on genetic resources, underscoring that collaboration must honour cultural ownership and prevent exploitation.

Four Models Capturing the Global Reality

To help countries make sense of their existing systems, WHO introduces a four-quadrant model based on two dimensions: centralized vs. decentralized governance and pluralism vs. unification of medical paradigms. The resulting categories reflect real-world diversity. People-led models empower individuals to navigate freely between TCIM and biomedical providers with minimal state direction beyond safety rules. Practitioner-led models depend on clinicians who blend or coordinate TCIM and biomedical interventions, sometimes in integrative clinics. Coordinated models arise when governments intentionally support collaboration through referral networks, co-location, or formal policy, while maintaining distinct systems. Blended models represent the highest degree of structural integration, where unified regulation, education, and service delivery merge TCIM and biomedicine. WHO stresses that no model is superior; each reflects cultural history, health system maturity, and political priorities.

Mapping Integration Through Health-System Building Blocks

The report links its framework to WHO’s six health-system building blocks, governance, financing, service delivery, workforce, information systems, and health products, showing how each block can align with different integration models. A country may maintain pluralistic governance while adopting blended product regulation or coordinated service delivery. These mixed configurations, observed during site visits and literature review, demonstrate that integration rarely evolves uniformly. Instead, it advances in layers: insurance schemes may lag behind workforce reforms, or product regulation may be modernized before service delivery becomes coordinated. This diagnostic insight helps governments identify inconsistencies and determine which aspects require reform.

Where Effective Integration Begins

Across country examples, one theme recurs: mutual respect between biomedical and TCIM practitioners. Systems that encourage communication, whether through referrals, interdisciplinary teams, or shared facilities, enable more coherent, person-centred care. Leadership support also proves critical. Even decentralized systems require policy signals, funding, and basic regulation to prevent unsafe, inequitable, or fragmented integration. The report also challenges the assumption that fully blended systems offer the ideal pathway. Evidence is still insufficient to determine which model best supports SDG 3, highlighting the need for comparative outcomes research and stronger monitoring mechanisms.

To translate theory into practice, WHO introduces an Integration Assessment Tool (IAT) that allows countries to score each building block along the two core dimensions and visually map their integration profile. Pilot assessments from three countries reveal striking variations: one strongly coordinated and pluralistic, another in transition toward coordination, and a third primarily people-led but evolving slowly toward structured integration. The tool offers policymakers a clearer, evidence-based lens to evaluate progress, gaps, and future directions.

The WHO framework asserts that there is no single ideal model for integrating TCIM. Countries must adapt strategies to their cultural, political, and health-system contexts. What the framework does provide is a shared vocabulary and a structured method that can strengthen policymaking, foster global learning, and ensure that TCIM, an essential part of people’s lived health experience, contributes meaningfully to resilient, people-centred health systems worldwide.