The World Health Organization on Wednesday announced a long-awaited restructuring intended to streamline the agency — and strongly hinted that it intended to shake up some staffers’ resistance to change.

The announcement, made in a lengthy and mostly cheerful speech delivered jointly by the organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and the directors of the agency’s six regional offices, aims to serve the W.H.O.’s new targets: to get affordable health care to the world’s poorest 1 billion people; to better protect them against epidemics; and to help them enjoy better health, including protection from noncommunicable diseases like cancer.

But it was unclear how the plan, as announced, would increase efficiency.

A fundamental rewrite of the W.H.O.’s charter would be needed to fix what is sometimes called the agency’s “birth defect.” Its regional officers are independently elected, and have large staffs and budgets they are reluctant to cut. Some even resist cooperating with headquarters in Geneva.

That has had serious consequences. The slow response to the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak, blamed partly on tension between the Africa regional office and headquarters in Geneva under Dr. Tedros’s predecessor, Dr. Margaret Chan, allowed that outbreak to spiral out of control until it ultimately killed more than 11,000 people.