OVERVIEW STATEMENT
Towards Health For All
This is a resource platform for conversations between activists, implementers, researchers and policy-makers on global and national health issues that are important for progress towards Health for All the Right to Health and Healthcare. It aims to provide curated access to knowledge resources relevant to these goals and disseminates the relevant work on these themes by the resource collective that has organized this website.
RECENT
Conversations On Health Policy
Digitization of public health information systems has greatly increased the burden of data-work of frontline health care providers, reducing the time available for healthcare. But though huge volumes of data are generated, data-reliability remains low and its use in improving health outcomes uncertain. Ironically, HMIS, once the subject of health sector reforms, has now become one of its main objects. In this conversation, learning from the past, we propose some principles of design that would help develop HMISs that are more fit for purpose.
The ABDM is India’s ambitious push for digitization in the health sector. In this conversation, four researchers who have been associated with the design and implementation of healthcare IT systems, take a closer look at the ABDM and strive to understand what the program set out to do, what it has done and where it is headed. They explore what ABDM offers for the problems of access, equity and quality of care and the information needs of public health managers. Or has digitization become an end in itself? There are challenges but there are opportunities too….
The Ayushman-Bharat- Health and Wellness Scheme(AB-HWC), launched in 2018, is India’s big hope to deliver on the promise of universal and comprehensive primary health care- a logical extension of the efforts that the National Health Mission,2005 had begun. Its success would have paved the way for the realization of the right to healthcare. But in its rapid scaling up there has been weak conceptual clarity and many essential features of the scheme are under threat. Can the situation be retrieved? In this conversation, three public health practitioners who have been closely associated with its design and/or implementation discuss some of the urgent course corrections that the public health community could help with….
A critical reading of the Progress Update is essential for those in engaged in practice or research in health systems and health policy. This conversation addresses some of the technical challenges of measurement, and implicitly its politics. What we measure as progress is closely related to where we want to go and how we intend to get there. To the average health manager and the health activist this could be heavy reading, but we hope that this conversation helps demystify health metrics, and make for more informed participation in “evidence-based decision making”.
The chronic shortfall of specialist skills in CHCs, cripples our ability to universalize comprehensive primary health care. Such skills are essential to provide referral support and continuity of care to primary care providers and patients. The persistence of the problem and the failure of many efforts to address this shortfall should lead us to introspect on basic design flaws. Drawing on national and international experience, we discuss how this gap can and must be addressed and that too on a priority basis…
Resources for Health Systems Strengthening
Library of Case Studies
These case studies are intended to support the teaching of health systems and health policy as well as to help practitioners and policy makers with operational examples to assist in problem solving and policy formulation. The emphasis is on positive stories, but we include many with negative and mixed learnings as well. Case studies are very contextual and these are collected over a decade. Please keep this in mind when interpreting and using this material.
