Equity
© Ogunpitan Adeyemi/Shutterstock.com Effective health planning is critical in ensuring affordable, accessible, and high quality health services for all. Many low- and middle-income countries rely on donor funding to establish or maintain the basic healthcare services, and often struggle to ensure sustainability of these when sources of funding in the sector change. Multilateral organisations and government partners have… Read more
The ability of countries to provide available, affordable, and high quality healthcare services to their populations has become a global priority. However, at least half of the population around the world still don’t have access to essential healthcare, and around 100 million people are pushed into extreme poverty because they have to pay for healthcare. Universal… Read more
Vimal Kumar, principal consultant in the Oxford Policy Management Health team, discusses the importance of procurement and supply chain management in supporting effective policy reforms. Ensuring availability, affordability, and quality of commodities (for example medicines) to provide services to the patients is one of the key outcomes which procurement and supply chain management establishes. This… Read more
In 2017 the Canadian IDRC concluded a six-year programme supporting research organisations in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lebanon, Peru and Vietnam in the development and testing of solutions to strengthen health systems through information technology. The programme under the title ‘Strengthening Equity through Applied Research Capacity building in eHealth’ (SEARCH) set out four objectives:… Read more
Decades of conflict in South Sudan, pre and post-independence in 2011, poverty and poor access to services have increased the rate of disability and rendered people with disabilities more marginalised and excluded as a result of the numerous attitudinal, environmental, and institutional barriers they face, and the lack of concerted efforts to include them. This… Read more
There is lack of published data on the costs of blood and blood transfusion in sub-Saharan Africa (Mafirakureva et al., 2016). Experts consulted for this rapid review confirm that the deficiency in the breakdown of components involved in costs hinders fair comparative analysis with different countries. Although the focus for this rapid review is on… Read more
Dr Helen Elsey is from the Nuffield Centre for International Health and Development, University of Leeds. In this HEART Talks she talks through the urban health HEART reading packs that she has put together with Dr Siddharth Agarwal from the Urban Health Resource Centre in India. The three reading packs are: A) Data and evidence,… Read more
Community health workers (CHWs) are uniquely placed to link communities with the health system, playing a role in improving the reach of health systems and bringing health services closer to hard-to-reach and marginalised groups. A systematic review was conducted to determine the extent of equity of CHW programmes and to identify intervention design factors which… Read more
In a group interview Sarah Ssali (Makerere University), Sally Theobald (Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine), Rosemary Morgan (John Hopkins University) and Asha George (John Hopkins University) talk about essential gender issues in relation to health systems. They also promote the RinGs Initiative (Research in Gender and Ethics) and talk about how people can get involved…. Read more
Dr Haja Wurie is based at the College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences in Freetown, Sierra Leone. In this HEART talks video she describes the rebuilding of health systems in the post-conflict period in Sierra Leone as ‘fire-fighting’. This meant that the response did not adequately capture gender. Ensuring service provision for women and… Read more
Valerie Percival is an Assistant Professor at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs. She leads the ReBUILD project ‘Building Back Better: Taking forward empirical research on the opportunities and constraints for building gender responsive health systems in post conflict contexts’. This is the focus of Valerie’s HEART talks video. The first issue for humanitarian focus… Read more