After attending the Fourth Symposium on Global Health Systems Research (Vancouver, Canada) themed “Resilient and responsive health systems for a changing world” we could not help but search for our lost glass slipper. Influenced by the catastrophic Ebola and Zika outbreaks, this flagship initiative of Health Systems Global (HSG) was immensel...

Rohingyas are said to be the ‘most persecuted minorities in the world’. I don’t have a journal article citation or scientific reference for this, but if you Google using these phrases, you will find their name. Who are the Rohingyas? They are a Muslim minority group residing in the Rakhine state of Myanmar. According to some scholars, Rohi...

Triggered by Asmat Malik’s post Does supporting Brexit and US election results make you a far-right populist?   In his article Asmat Malik makes the argument that “It is the time to look beyond the worst aspects of Trump-style-rhetoric and instead capitalize upon the opportunities offered by the ‘Big Bang’”. I believe that we can find ...

Last week, at the global conference on health promotion in Shanghai, Margaret Chan used,  as far as I know at least, for the first time the (increasingly familiar) term “post-fact, post-truth” world to describe the world in which ‘health for all/UHC/…’ as well as scientific knowledge now have to be defended. We all have our work cut o...

A good friend of mine has strong reservations about using the term “unpack”, a term that is quite popular in the health policy and systems discourse. The term lends a notion of flexibility to concepts and ideas that have some currency but whose actual definition or interpretation remain somewhat unclear. I’ve given some thought to my frien...

When there’s a problem in a system that is resilient, the problem should not only be an indication of what is amiss; but also of the inherent and latent resources available for remedy. Resilience denotes a system’s capacity and elasticity to absorb, appropriately respond to, and rebuild from shock – features that are tested and proven in cri...

I am Co-chair of the Emerging Voices for Global Health. Many of my EV colleagues and other health system researchers think, half-jokingly perhaps but still, that my ideas are reflective of the ones of far-right populists because I support the Brexit and US election results. However, I strongly feel that this is not the case, rather they have sto...

As part of the ongoing Global Health Systems Research Symposium 2016, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in collaboration with Emerging Voices of Global Health organized a session on “Healthcare beyond borders” on the first day of the symposium in Vancouver.  Our world is an increasingly mobile and inter-connected world; around 1 billion peop...

HSG 2016 is off to a terrific start here in Vancouver.  On just the first day of the two-day satellite session period, the energy was palpable, with engaging sessions on topics ranging from the practicalities of achieving universal health coverage beyond borders, to the politics and governance of evidence. For a moment, you could almost forget ...