There has been a lot of attention in the press for the so called “Uber model “  lately. “Workers on tap”, as the Economist put it, succinctly. A brave new era in which many employees will be replaced by self-employed individuals (or “independent contractors”), and where the most successful businesses will be the ones that design the...

You’ve probably heard the story of the blind men and the elephant—how each man perceived it differently depending on which part of the elephant he touched.  Health systems are like the elephant, with each person having a different view depending on his or her experiences and interactions. These different conceptualizations of health systems...

Throughout the Third Global Health Symposium 2014 (Health Systems Research, Cape Town, South Africa), attention was continuously drawn to the fact that the voices of the “victims” of weak health systems were missing from the symposium. There was a unanimous call to ensure that these people would be included in future HSR conferences. Recentl...

It’s an odd thing to crave cafeteria food. Yet, here it is. An unexpected craving for an interesting salmon ‘burger’ with, you guessed it, fries. A new study in The Lancet on ‘Dietary quality among men and women in 187 countries in 1990 and 2010: a systematic assessment’ doesn’t rank the Belgian diet, very highly. In fact, they fit t...

The Ebola epidemic in the Western African Region has reminded the international community why it is so important to have a skilled health workforce in place to provide essential and universal health services.  It is a crucial requirement to contain outbreaks of re-emerging infectious diseases. Sadly, it is this very scarce workforce that has be...

In many ways, those of us who are academics live for scholarly journals. The research and commentary published in them are what we are judged by; the measure of an academic’s value, a false and perverse measure no less. Journals set the debate (or have the power to do so), arbitrate which knowledge is legitimate, what the right methods are, wh...

The Health Policy and Systems Research (HPSR) community in India and beyond is eagerly awaiting the roll out of the inaugural KEYSTONE course.  KEYSTONE is a nationwide HPSR capacity building initiative, coordinated and convened by Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) as a Nodal Institute of the WHO Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Re...

A plethora of examples, a panoply of presentations, and a parade of tweets (@resupmeetup) and blogs. This overflowing energy and overwhelming activity is the hallmark of all major conferences these days. So what makes the ResUpMeetUp   symposium unique?  Well for starters, the 2 day symposium complemented with a 2 day training workshop focuse...

Valentine is coming, as you might know (or prefer to ignore), and some wicked commercial minds in Belgium have decided that ‘The time is Now’ to release ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’, the movie version. As you can imagine, no sensible man wants to see this movie with his partner or lover, so Belgian movie theatres organize ‘Ladies at the Movi...