Setting the scene: the challenges of universal health coverage and the contribution of management education

The last decades are being characterized by global trends such as population growth, aging, escalation of non communicable diseases and technological innovation. These unprecedented changes are moving faster than economic growth and threaten universal health coverage. What is at stake nowadays is governments' and healthcare systems' ability to renovate themselves and develop new paradigms aimed at finding innovative solutions to manage the new global forces so to maintain universal access to care in a changing environment. We have to be imaginative because if we keep relying on current paradigms to answer already too far-ahead complex problems, we will fail. And here education has a role to play. Although the recent years have seen a steep increase in the offerings of post-graduate management education programs in health and healthcare, the majority of these programs are still traditionally conceived and designed, aiming to train students to deal with specific, domestic, current problems. With the promise of making students the best specialists on Earth, to get the highest return on his or her investment in education, the performance of these programs is often measured in terms of earnings maximization. Although an indicator of success, this often incentivizes individuals to be context-based, individualistic, short-sighted and self-focused. Education has the greatest potential to foster imagination, to leverage diversity, to exploit team-working and free creative thinking. Education can substantially contribute to anticipate the impact of global forces by but an endeavor is needed to design programs and measures performances differently.