Complementary medicine research, including naturopathic medicine research, is plagued with many methodological challenges, the authors of this paper argue. Many of these challenges have also been experienced in public health research. Public health research has met these challenges with a long history of multidisciplinary, multimethod, and whole systems approaches to research that may better resonate with the “real world” clinical settings of naturopathic medicine. Additionally, many of the underlying principles of naturopathic medicine are analogous to the underlying principles and activities of public health, specifically in such areas as health promotion, prevention, patient education, and proactive rather than reactive approaches to disease management and treatment. Future research in the field of naturopathic medicine may benefit from adopting public health research models rather than focusing exclusively on biomedical models, the authors argue. A complementary and collaborative relationship between these fields may provide an opportunity to deliver research that more accurately reflects naturopathic medicine practice, as well as providing the opportunity to improve health outcomes more generally.
Monitoring equity and research policy
At the Berlin 9 conference, held in Washington DC, United States from 9-10 November 2011, it was announced that 33 research institutions, associations and foundations in North America have added their signatures to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, committing to support open access research in the future. The signing brings the total signatories to nearly 300, including many of the top research institutions in the world. The Berlin Declaration aims to ‘make scientific and scholarly research more accessible to the broader public by taking full advantage of the possibilities offered by digital electronic communication.’
In this study, researchers investigated the alignment of health research capacity at Makerere College of Health Sciences (MakCHS) with the health needs and priorities of Uganda, as outlined in the country’s Health Sector Strategic Plan (HSSP). They assessed MakCHS’s research grants and publication portfolio, as well as all the university’s publications, between January 2005 and December 2009. A total of 58 active grants were identified, of which 18 had been initiated prior to 2005 and there were an average of about eight new grants per year. Most grants funded basic and applied research, with major focus areas being HIV and AIDS (44%), malaria (19%), maternal and child health (14%) and tuberculosis (11%). A total of 837 publications were identified, with an average of 167 publications per year, 66% of which addressed the country’s priority health areas, and 58% had MakCHS faculty members or students as first authors. Findings indicate that the research grants and publications at MakCHS are generally well-aligned with Ugandan Health Ministry priorities. Greater efforts to establish centralised and efficient grants management procedures are needed, the researchers argue. In addition, efforts are needed to expand capacity for MakCHS faculty leadership of grants, as well as to continue to expand the contribution of MakCHS faculty to lead research publications.
In this study, reproductive-age women were recruited from the Butajira Demographic Surveillance System (DSS) database to analyse the determinants of fertility in rural Ethiopia. A district health survey maternity history questionnaire was administered to 9,996 participants. Results showed that delayed marriage, a higher level of education, a smaller family, absence of child death experience and living in food-secured households were associated with a smaller number of children. Fertility was significantly higher among women with no child-sex preference. However, migration status of women was not statistically significant. The researchers argue that policy makers should focus on increasing women’s secondary school enrollment and age at first marriage. The community should also be made aware on the negative impact of fertility on household economy, the environment and the country's socio-economic development at large.
The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), in conjunction with the World Health Organisation, private sector and foundation partners, is preparing to launch a new voluntary database for the sharing of intellectual property for research and development (R&D) on medicines, vaccines and diagnostics for neglected diseases. The project will target least-developed countries and is likely to include a database and a space for creating partnerships. But budget, oversight and the role of member states are still unclear. The aim of the initiative is to boost discovery and development of medicines, vaccines and diagnostics for neglected tropical diseases plus malaria and tuberculosis through greater availability of intellectual property to researchers.
The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has joined the Research4Life partnership, which enables free or low-cost online access in the developing world to vital scientific research. With a particular focus on applied science and technology, Access to Research for Development and Innovation (ARDI) seeks to reinforce the capacity of developing countries to participate in the global knowledge economy and to support researchers in developing countries in the innovation process to create and develop new solutions to technical challenges faced on local and global levels. ARDI includes a growing network of Technology and Innovation Support Centres (TISCs) based in universities and research centres around the world, whose trained staff support local users in effectively accessing and exploiting technological knowledge.
Mahmood Mamdani, director of Makerere University's Institute of Social Research in Uganda, has accused universities in Sub-Saharan Africa of not creating researchers but churning out native informers for national and international non-governmental organisations. Addressing academics and students at Makerere, Mamdani said academic research and higher education in most African universities is controlled and dominated by a corrosive culture of consultancy. The little research capacity that exists in Africa, especially in universities, is driven by culture of consultancy and global market trends, with African researchers being used to provide raw material - in form of data - to foreign academics who process it and then re-export it back to Africa. He told his audience that research proposals from African universities are increasingly simply descriptive accounts of data collection and the methods used to collate data. According to the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), Africa is home to only 2.3% of the world's researchers.
There remains considerable disconnect between globalisation scholars about how to conceptualise its meaning and how we understand how its processes operate and transform our lives. The authors of this article argue that to better understand what globalisation is and how it affects issues such as global health, we can explore how the multiple processes of globalisation are encountered and informed by different social groups within particular contexts. The article reviews how qualitative field research assist in doing this. Three recent case studies conducted on globalisation and HIV and AIDS are reviewed for their use of qualitative methods in understanding the contexts and processes of globalisation and their impact on health.
In this paper, the author considers how operational research and management science can improve the design of health systems and the delivery of health care, particularly in low-resource settings. He identifies some gaps in the way operational research is typically used in global health and proposes steps to bridge them, before outlining some analytical tools of operational research and management science and illustrating how their use can inform some typical design and delivery challenges in global health. The paper concludes by considering factors that will increase and improve the contribution of operational research and management science to global health.
According to this report by UNESCO, in sub-Saharan Africa, social science themes have over the years evolved from topics such as structural adjustment, poverty, gender, the spread of armed confl icts, and HIV and AIDS to more recent concerns such as citizenship and rights in an era of crisis, and the response to neoliberalism. The big challenge, however, is to reconstruct autonomous social science research in Africa. But as the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) points out, the lack of a research infrastructure prevents social scientists from contributing as much as they could to these social endeavours. In low-income countries, the increasing role of consultancy firms and NGOs in social science research follows the relative or absolute shrinking of public funds allocated to universities, for research in general and for the social sciences in particular. In such conditions, academics rarely have the chance of working on long-term projects involving strong theoretical considerations. The report also points to the corrosive effect of the ‘brain drain’ on research in low-income countries and acknowledges many of these countries have instituted measures to help retain professionals, but the efficiency of these measures remains limited as long as working conditions do not improve significantly.