Health Governance
Global Governance and Global Health Policy
For those wanting a comprehensive introduction to Global Health Governance and even a overall introduction to global health policy and practice we recommend “ Text book of International Health” Third Edition by Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Timothy H. Holtz, and Yogan Pillay (2009) . A fourth edition of this same book called the Text Book of Global Health is also available. It is unlikely that any one paper could do justice to this theme.
One useful paper that follows one part of the development of global health policy is “ The Origins of Primary Health Care and Selective Primary Healthcare by Marcus Coeto.
In the peoples health movement framework a good introduction is David Sanders classic “ The Struggle for Health: Medicine and the Politics of Underdevelopment.” A recent posthumously published revised version of this is available. The good news- a public full text is available. The link is attached.
Another excellent repository of material on global health policy is the Peoples Health Movements’ WHO Tracker. This has all the resolutions and reports adopted by the World Health Organization in the last decade along with a critical appraisal from the peoples health movement. It takes time to learn to use this portal and to explore it to find what you need, but its well worth the effort.
Regulation is one major component of Health Governance. We share a study report on” Best Practices and Models for Private Sector Regulation.” which is a cross-country analysis of several models of private sector regulation, done in year 2017 with WHO support.
To give readers an overview of all the sub-themes that constitute the domain of Health Governance we share “Strengthening Health Systems Governance-Better Policies, Stronger Performance” a publication of the European Health Observatory. Though it cannot be used as such by researchers or practitioners in LMICs, and is not framed within the critical political economy understanding of the other documents, it is still a good overview of the topic that we recommend.
National Overview and Health Policy (India)
We begin our collection with the National Health Policy 2017. We then add two comments on that policy. The first of these “National Health Policy – A Cautious Welcome:” is on the policy itself. And the second of these “Ayushman Bharat- Hopes and Fears” is on a scheme proposed as part of the implementation of the National Health Policy.
We then also share two important documents that went into the making of this policy. The first of these is a public document, which has seldom been referred to – and is the “Situational Analyses- Backdrop to The National Health Policy” on which this policy was made. The other is the Draft National Health Policy,2015 which was approved by the Steering Committee that made the policy and which was put up for public consultation on December 31st, 2014. It is a useful referral document to understand the intense discussions that went into adoption of the final policy.
The larger questions that form the core of contestation on the making of health policy in this decade formed the content of the article- “Health sector reform at the COVID-19 cross-roads: Public goods or health markets – An agenda for health systems research. “Published in Indian J Public Health 2021; This had been earlier presented as the KN Rao Memorial Annual Lecture that same year.
We also enclose an earlier more descriptive article on this theme “Health Sector in India: Perspective and Way Forward” published In Yojana, February 2016.
State Government Policies and Programmes
This part of the collection has to be built up. We make a small beginning by drawing attention to the very recent release of a special issue of the International Journal of Health Equity, exclusively on kerala. All the eight papers of this issue are on open access.
We draw attention to one paper in this edition: Kerala’s progress towards universal health coverage: the road travelled and beyond. Adithyan, G., Ranjan, A., Muraleedharan, V.R. et al.
We also share an unpublished paper that was prepared for the Kerala government at their request reviewing Kerala’s efforts at Health Systems Strengthening and recommendations on the way forward. We also share a similar report on Building Public Healthcare System in Tamil Nadu:What Must Government Do in the next 3 Years? written in year 2021.
This is a very incomplete collection. A very preliminary stage.