Access to Oxygen Initiative

Medical oxygen is a life-saving medicine that is used to treat many conditions throughout the care continuum. Despite the clinical importance of medical oxygen and inclusion on the WHO Essential Medicines List, it remains a hard to access resource in health care settings.  

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted inequities in availability and access to this life-saving medicine and the inherent challenges in the process of generation, distribution, and delivery of oxygen to patients.  

The WHO Access to Oxygen Initiative provides technical and operational support to Member States.  This includes identifying and implementing holistic solutions to enable a resilient oxygen ecosystem. 

A suite of online tools support decisions and maintenance of these oxygen systems, and can be found here: Oxygen tools. These web-based applications are also independently accessible, allowing users to: estimate ongoing energy costs, and total cost of ownership; convert units of oxygen; assess oxygen plant component performance (booster compressor); plan preventative maintenance. The user can easily download the results for offline use, and no information or data are stored by the apps. Individual tools can be found here:

Quantifying oxygen needs-gap at the facility level

Estimating electrical operational costs of an on-site oxygen generation system

Estimate total cost of ownership, including capital and operational costs, of a newly acquired oxygen generation system along its lifespan

Generate a preventive maintenance calendar and estimate the time to next required maintenance for an on-site oxygen generation system, including the diesel generator

Assess the actual and expected operational performance of the booster compressor, determine the volume of oxygen produced and translate to number of cylinders filled

Conversion and equivalence of common metrics / units used when measuring oxygen volume