The International Health Policies newsletter, “your weekly International update on Health Policies”, is the flagship activity of the IHP network and provides a curated listing of the week’s key global health (policy) news, events and publications. Every Friday, the newsletter highlights and synthesizes the main knowledge on issues like global health governance, UHC, antimicrobial resistance, infectious diseases, Non-Communicable Disease (NCDs), Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR), planetary health, … The newsletter also presents featured articles by a network of young and more experienced global health practitioners, mostly from Africa, Asia and Latin America.
You can subscribe to the newsletter here, if you haven’t already.
How to make the most of the newsletter (and navigate it efficiently):
The newsletter usually starts with an Introduction (by a member of the editorial team) and then a Featured article (by a guest contributor).
In the Highlights section, we provide an overview of all the main global health policy (agenda) & governance news of the week, as well as a few “must know about” reports or other publications ( eg. a new Lancet series, World Report, ….). If you have gone through this section, you should be more or less up to speed again on what happened over the past week. So if you’re short on time, do read at least this Highlights section – it’s what we consider the ‘One week stop’.
In the other sections, organized by niche (eg: Global Health Governance, NCDs, Global Health Financing, Pandemic Preparedness and response, …. starting from the section ‘Global Health Events’), we tend to offer extra (scientific) papers, as well as some more reads that might be of interest to scholars, activists and other change agents focusing on a certain area. You can scan some of these sections according to your own professional interests.
In line with the “Switching the Poles” vision of ITM, the aim of the network is to primarily boost the influence of scholars from the Global South on the global health policy agenda, with a focus on young health policy & systems researchers. The main activities include:
The weekly International Health Policies (IHP) newsletter and featured articles/editorials are the key outputs of the Network and support the knowledge management and networking pillars of the Network.
While agreeing that labels such as ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ are fast losing their relevance in today’s world, the IHP Network also aims to boost synergies with actors and networks from Africa, Asia and Latin-America with a similar agenda and values. They are key stakeholders in the EV4GH programme, often playing an active role in supporting young researchers from the Global South in developing their skills and capacities, sharing their work and experiences across platforms as well as at the HSR symposia.
Members of the IHP Network are encouraged and supported towards networking opportunities, at global and regional conferences, workshops or networking events.
We welcome contributions in the form of feature articles and blogs (500-800 words). Guest writers can write a comment piece reflecting on a ‘hot’ topic, trend or event in global health, or can highlight a health issue that they feel is being neglected on the global health (policy) scene. Young writers can also propose an article on the links between their PhD research and the global health agenda, provide timely comments on a conference or other global health event they recently attended, … in other words, there are plenty of options for a possible contribution.
While the newsletter focuses on writers from the Global South, we also welcome contributions from people based in the North. If you wish to contribute, please contact Kristof Decoster (ITM) at ihpnetwork@itg.be. Also use the same email account if you want to suggest articles or other publications which you consider relevant for the weekly newsletter.
The Editorial board reserves the right to feature articles and blogposts that appear on IHP on other blogs and platforms (in accordance with agreements with partner blogs). Credit will always be given on these sites to the original author and to the IHP website, where the post appeared first, and vice versa (i.e. posts that appeared first on other sites and are then cross-posted on IHP, will give due credit to the platform where they appeared first).