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Young (and occasionally less young) researchers, mostly from LMICs, present their views on global health issues.
Very soon a number of health system and policy researchers and practitioners, civil society, academia and policy makers from around the world will gather in Vancouver, Canada for the Fourth Global Symposium on Health Systems Research (HSR). The build-up to this biennial conference shows that there is considerable excitement and debate on this ye...
At a time when governments in the most affluent countries are turning their agendas into monopolistic interest-friendly policies, international trade agreements such as TTIP, TPP, CETA and TISA, among others, are incurring criticism for the effects these agreements will have on access to health services for the public health. These cases represe...
Once every twenty years the United Nations brings together thousands of participants from member states to garner and secure political commitment, review past commitments, address and identify challenges towards sustainable urban development. This week, Quito (Ecuador) played host to the UN’s third conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban D...
As health systems researchers and policymakers we need to remember that the word “gender” is not synonymous with “woman.” Gender analysis is about exploring how gendered power relations (eg. norms, roles, access to resources, decision-making) affect differences in health system experiences, access, and outcomes for men, women, and people of othe...
German chancellor Merkel’s slogan “Wir schaffen das” (we can do it) was first heard in 2015 after the onset of what has been called the greatest challenge of post-war Germany: the migration of hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced individuals (mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan) over the last year into the country. While this ...
There has been a lot of attention on women’s maternal health, not least because of the MDG targets, and this will continue with the SDGs. But how much of this work should be focused on bringing men into the world of maternal health? At one level, men are often the ones who control women’s access to health seeking and health care. At anot...
Last week, I participated in three consecutively-held global health seminars which focused on the changing nature of health cooperation and the increasing prominence of global health in international politics. Coincidentally, all meetings referred to (the need for) a paradigm shift in global health and the transformative change required to attai...
Over the past few weeks a couple of thematic discussions were organized for the new cohort of Emerging Voices. One of them focused on resilience, the resilience “discourse” and resilient health systems more in particular. After going through a few background readings (including Kruk et al (2015), Kutzin & Sparkes (2016), Gebauer (2016), am...
The much-anticipated report by the United Nations (UN) High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines went public on 14 September. Hopes that its forward-looking recommendations could speedily succeed are threatened, however, by the load of conflicting issues still on the table worldwide. The United Nations High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines ...