This morning the article “Have tenured academic position, will travel (frequently)” in the Sydney Morning Herald caught my attention via Twitter. The issues pointed out in the article, summarized aptly in the introductory paragraph as ‘Academics’ travel to overseas conferences is expensive and environmentally damaging but many see it as a ...

As health system researchers, how do we contribute to a paradigm shift? How do we move the focus from disease specific/fragmented health programs towards integrated, patient-centred health systems, especially given the abundance of disease-specific funding? At the recent International AIDS Society conference in Vancouver, Canada I lauded the as...

I’m at FfD3, which stands for Third Conference on Financing for Development, in Addis. Why? I’m not an economist, nor a development expert and certainly no politician. I work for a medical humanitarian organization, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). The environment we work in is strongly defined by development politics. The current move away...

‘Resisting Resilience’ was the title of the most inspiring presentation I attended in the last half year.  Early June, Mark Neocleous, a professor of the Critique of Political Economy,  presented his view at a conference on the resilience discourse organized by Medico International in Frankfurt. If you want to know what makes his argument ...

I recently started reading the book ‘To save humanity’ (edited by Julio Frenk & Steven Hoffman), after receiving it as a present from my colleague Gorik Ooms. It’s a collection of essays, and I’m not far yet. Witnessing the almost criminal “spectacle” over the last weeks and especially days in Brussels, one cannot help but wonder whe...

Our Newsletter’s editor-in-chief (allow me to call you like that, Kristof) is a very curious guy. An early draft of Sara and Pierre’s Featured Article for this week’s IHP issue, ‘Health in Argentina’ had only just landed on his desk (the draft included a reference to “achievements in the field of social determinants of health”, und...

The end of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner´s government is near; time to assess the achievements of 12 years of the same government in Argentina, with (first) the late Néstor Kirchner and (then) his wife Cristina Kirchner. The Kirchners provoke passions: you either love them or hate them, and this makes an analysis of Argentina’s progress an...

This report by Sara Van Belle (Health Policy unit, ITM) provides an overview of the International Roundtable on Health Systems strengthening in Fragile settings. The Roundtable took place in Antwerp on 12 February, 2015. You can find in the report, among others, the day’s proceedings, its conclusions and recommendations for the organizers and ...

In a recent article in Foreign Policy, Philippe Douste-Blazy (quoted in the piece) champions once again ‘innovative financing’, a familiar concept for the global health community.  Among others, he refers to the airline levy implemented by a number of countries, which has raised “more than $2 billion to help fight HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, ...