There are many among us who hope the Ebola crisis will turn out to be a wake-up call for the international community to invest more in global health security, including health systems strengthening in countries with (too) weak health systems. Whether you call it a global “Katrina moment” or a global “SARS moment”, depending on your polit...

Now that I am back at my desk in Stockholm I cannot stop thinking about the Global health systems symposium that I attended in Cape Town, maybe because it was my first! And of course I cannot and never will forget the great experience and knowledge gained being part of the Emerging Voices 2014, definitely a life changing experience not to mentio...

Disclaimer: This blog is not intended to hurt anyone, but rather to reflect on some personal experiences in a humorous way! I reiterate that the team from ITM and UWC did such a fantastic job arranging this program! I also thoroughly enjoyed my stay at Hotel Verde which became like home. Also, I’ve made a couple of long semi-technical presenta...

If you follow a bit the debate on hazard pay   for medical staff in Liberia, with a monthly hazard pay of less than $ 500 dollar for nurses (which has obviously led to calls for a strike), and contrast this with the (recently boosted) weekly salary of Eden Hazard, Chelsea football player (now 240 000 Euro), you know the world has gone mad. (Di...

It’s been a week since the 3rd Global Symposium on Health Systems Research, and I’m still puzzled by how it closed. It felt a bit anti-climactic that after a week of discussing why a systems approach– grounded in social justice, with enough attention paid to system complexities– is necessary to improve health outcomes in an effective and sus...

As I got ready to jet off back to Johannesburg, South Africa, I reflected on the two weeks I spent in Cape Town, undoubtedly one of the most beautiful cities in South Africa. I was privileged to be selected and fully sponsored to participate in the Emerging Voices programme as well as the Third Global Symposium on Health Systems Research. Born a...

Two and a half weeks Cape Town aren’t yet out of my (I’m afraid not so complex) system, but I thought I’d try to put together some thoughts on the third HSR Symposium anyway. Not very systematically, but rather in a random way, the way  Donald Sutherland (not the ‘Hunger games’ actor) started his pitch on Vancouver, the venue for the ...

As the third global symposium on health systems research draws to an end in Cape Town, on Thursday we had an exciting and energizing discussion in the session entitled “Gender and rights-oriented health systems research: methodological approaches and challenges”. It was realized that there are important sexual and reproductive health challen...

Health systems are increasingly being understood and described as complex adaptive systems. I attended an interesting discussion the other day at Health Systems Global on “Postings and Transfers” of healthcare staff, a cross-cutting issue in most countries, where a former bureaucrat from an Indian state was invited to share about measures th...