Many countries are reforming their health systems working toward universal health coverage (UHC). These reforms can be harnessed to increase equity in medicines access, affordability, and appropriate use of medicines. However, they also have the potential to decrease the effectiveness of prescribing and dispensing, increase unnecessary use of medicines, and derail systems from a path toward sustainable universal coverage. The goal of the Medicines in Health Systems course is to strengthen the capacity of practitioners working toward universal health coverage in low- and middle-income country health systems to design, implement, and monitor evidence-informed pharmaceutical policy and management strategies. Specifically, after completing the course, participants will be able to explain the different roles medicines play in health systems, and the roles and responsibilities of different system actors with respect to medicines in systems. They will be able to illustrate the competing objectives that system stakeholders face when striving toward greater availability of and more equitable access to high quality medicines, at affordable costs for households and the system, and with appropriate use to achieve target health outcomes. Participants will learn to assess the potential of different medicines policy and management approaches to balance these competing objectives, and identify the facilitators of and barriers to success of specific strategies, in a given context. Lastly, participants will learn to lay out strategies for monitoring desired and potential unintended outcomes of specific medicines policy and management strategies in a given setting. It provides step-by-step guidelines for clinicians, ranging from diagnoses to correct medicine dosages, and how to administer the medicine.
Useful Resources
Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? Ghosh examines in a series of video lectures our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements, and suggests that global crises like the climate crisis challenge our thinking and ask us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task that fiction can support.
The writer and director, Ousmane Sembène, uses a then newly independent Senegal, hungry for political and social alternatives, as the backdrop for this widely acclaimed film. Through the film’s main character, Diouana Sembène makes a powerful argument about Senegal’s independence and the impact of colonialism in Africa. It was one of the first African films to receive international acclaim. The short one-hour film, released in 1966, is a simple yet powerful story of a Senegalese nanny, who hopes and dreams of a better future, but is tied down by the French couple who hire her. Sembene presents a powerful critique of black aspiration to be in a France, or more broadly, in a colonizer’s country. Though people are now free in Senegal, they will in many ways still be seen as colonial objects. At a time where issues of race and class are resonating more than ever, and countries are struggling to come to terms with their colonial legacies, Black Girl remains a powerful story about personal and political freedom—one that stills hits just as hard.
“Is South Africa’s rainbow nation a myth? What is race in 2016?” These are the questions explored in a powerful new documentary film from South Africa. The People versus the Rainbow Nation investigates what drove the country’s students towards mass action in 2015, between the successful #RhodesMustFall campaign to the nationwide #FeesMustFall protests. Filmmaker Lebogang Rasethaba (Future Sound of Mzansi) and producer Allison Swank follow the lives of students across four South African universities as they explore the notion that more than two decades since South Africa’s first democratic elections, the struggle is far from over. “I think it’s about to get really intense in South Africa,” says one student. “I don’t believe in the Rainbow Nation. The Rainbow Nation is a fallacy,” says another.
The HST Conference 2016 programme included 90 oral and poster presentations from a wide range of presenters in the South African public health policy, research and implementation field. Presentations range from health governance and health financing to health counselling and electronic medical records. The presentations are available at this site..
The KEYSTONE open access teaching and learning materials on Health Policy and Systems Research (38 videos and 43 slide presentations across 13 modules) are now live online. These teaching and learning resources were developed for the inaugural KEYSTONE India short course on Health Policy and Systems Research. They include 38 videos and 43 slide presentations organized across 13 modules and cover a range of foundational concepts and common approaches used in HPSR. This suite of teaching and learning materials was developed in the process of delivering the inaugural KEYSTONE course, and is being made available as an open access resource under the Creative Commons license.
The South African-based Mail & Guardian newspaper has launched an Africa wide health journalism centre, Bhekisisa. Bhekisisa means "to scrutinise" in Zulu. It has its own website. is mentoring reporters in African countries to file solutions-based health features for the website and is working with health policymakers, activists and researchers to write opinion pieces for the website.
This toolkit contains tools and resources relating to different categories of participatory governance practices, including for (1) public information, for citizens to access relevant information about government policies, decisions and actions; (2) education and deliberation; (3) public dialogue for communication between citizens and state; (4) design and implementation of public policies and plans that respond effectively to citizens’ priorities and needs; (5) public budgets and expenditures to help citizens understand and influence decisions about the allocation of public resources, monitor public spending and hold government actors accountable for their management of public financial resources (6) monitoring and evaluating the accessibility, quality and efficiency of public services and (7) monitoring and overseeing public action and seeking retribution for injustices or misdeeds.
April 7 was World Health Day and the European Day of Action against commercialisation of Health Care. For this occasion, Third World Health Aid launched its new video that compares the health system of Cuba with the privatized system in the Philippines and its impact on the population. It spreads a strong message of the necessity of free and accessible health care, and community involvement. In this video, Third World Health Aid compare the situation in two developing countries. Cuba is famous for its excellent health care, which is free of charge for its citizens. In the Philippines, access to health care is not so evident. Third World Health Aid see a big inequality. What explains this big difference.? The video shows a walk together with local health workers in the neighbourhoods of Havana and Manilla, the capitals of these two countries. It shows the different experiences of the broad range of factors affecting health, including health care.
Health Financing Africa host a cartoon showing a satirical response to the global development agendas. This cartoon draws on the "Sape" movement (The Society of Ambiance-Makers and Elegant People) in Brazzaville and Kinshasa. Universal Health Coverage figures into the new Sustainable Development Goals and, with a wink, Michel Muvudi (Democratic Republic of the Congo) warns us not to be overly optimistic about the impact of such international objectives at the country level.