Managing an epidemic requires tackling the health consequences of the outbreak, as well as its social, political, security, and economic dimensions. This implies setting priorities and making trade-offs between various interests and goals – in short, a lot of politics. The biomedical angle: science versus politics in epidemic response? Covera...

Last weekend, Dr. Farida Al Hosani, Director of the Communicable Diseases Department at Abu Dhabi’s Department of Health, reported in a televised interview that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had confirmed 13 cases of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). According to reports from the Institute of International Finance in Washington DC, the outb...

My father used to say that “there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.” In global health these days it’s difficult not to be part of the former tribe. At the start of this new decade, there are those who peddle “elixirs of optimism” about how the world has neve...

The 146th Executive Board meeting of the WHO was like an investment case in action for donors. Here was WHO leadership noting the passing of key resolutions, lending support to new initiatives, urging countries to work together to arrive at a consensus on vexatious issues, while briefing technical experts and the media every day on the emerging...

The 2020 Oscars made history for multiple reasons, among others: a foreign language film took the top prize, an actor from a Netflix series won, and one winner had 52 nominations in his lifetime!    What stood out for me, however, as a significant moment in the ceremony was when The Peanut Butter Falcon actor Zack Gottsagen took the stage with h...

Since the watershed moment of the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, the concept of health system resilience has been a recurring theme in global health discussions.  Although most frequently used in the context of epidemic response, resilience has also been framed as a ‘key pillar’ of health, and invoked in high-level calls for countries t...

Once again the global health community congregated in Bangkok for the annual Prince Mahidol Award Conference (28 Jan-2 Feb). I’ve chronicled my annual pilgrimage a few times before, calling attention to PMAC’s “elephant in the room” (2015) and examining its “political economy” (2019). While I’m still wishing for a future PMAC “pl...

The importance of historical and longitudinal perspectives is finally gaining attention in health policy and systems research (HPSR). HPSR is a field that is concerned with understanding and strengthening complex adaptive systems over time. Rather than magic bullets, our focus is on patterns of behaviour and long-term sustainable change. In HPS...

The field of Health Policy System Research (HPSR) offers us valuable theorisations and empirical work to guide us on how we can engage with the complex social, economic and political nature of health systems today. However, the field has not been able to fully grapple with theblind spots that are ever present in our reality. This is why we argue...