The Covid pandemic has taught us once again that good governance and leadership in health are critical ingredients of resilient health systems. Often, governance is misconstrued as a sole responsibility of the government and civil society. However, that is only part of the story, as citizen engagement and meaningful participation, by electing co...

A featured article published in this space on December 19, 2022 was called ‘Confronting the uncomfortable: Emerging voices’ reflections after a talk on decolonization‘. In it, eight EV’s who in Medellín had attended the Face-to-Face part of the EV 2022 venture reflected on a talk on decolonisation I delivered there at Antioquia Universi...

Opioid analgesics are essential medicines, needed for treating acute and chronic pain. Morphine, methadone, hydromorphone, oxycodone, codeine and fentanyl are all listed in the WHO Model Lists of Essential Medicines. However, being “attractive” for illicit use and abuse, they are also listed as “controlled substances” under the Single Co...

Bangladesh’s health care system has significantly improved over the past decades, among others reducing maternal and child mortality, increasing life expectancy and universal immunisation coverage. International indices point in the same direction. By way of example, even on the – since the pandemic somewhat notorious – (2021) Global Health Se...

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are the leading cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide,  with around 80% of NCD deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). An important obstacle to addressing the growing burden of NCDs in LMICs is the limited set of indicators to monitor NCD service coverage and the quality of primary heal...

“Prevent, detect, contain and treat”: following the pillars of its pandemic preparedness and response framework, Germany’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has been praised for its low fatality rate.  However, the conventional prioritization of immediate biomedical needs as the primary guiding principle in outbreak management arguably cam...

10 years ago, as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were coming to an end and millions of people were participating in consultations to develop the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a global health colleague sent me a link to the IHP newsletter with a message “this is good stuff, read this.” I’ve since followed the newsletter to t...

The climate crisis, COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical escalation are evidence that our ability to respond effectively to large-scale threats to population health and humanity is not limited by our technical know-how. Instead, our ability to navigate complex political terrain appears to be the main (and perpetual) stumbling block. Health policy ...

Intro (by Farchanda) This year, the Face-to-face (F2F) part of the Emerging Voices (EV) venture was held in Medellin, Colombia from October 20-30, in the run-up to the 7th Global Health Systems Research symposium in Bogota. ‘Decolonizing Global Health’ is such a hot topic nowadays, that it could impossibly be left out of the ‘Big Talks’...