By Alma Ionescu, University College London (UCL) Background Activism and advocacy are commonly misrepresented in popular discourse, often simply equated with street protests and depicted as loud, disturbing and violent. However, there’s much more to it than that. Broadly speaking, it is any effort towards changing the status quo in order to create positive change (for health, in this case). This means that the range of efforts it can encompass is extremely varied – from high-level actions, such as changing policy, to local level acts of solidarity that might go unseen to the outside eye. Howev ..read more

By Natasha Salaria (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) Health Policy and Planning is an open access journal publishing health policy and systems research focusing on low- and middle-income countries. The journal consists of four sections; Health Systems Research, Health Economics, Health Policy Processes and Implementation Research and Evaluation. In 2023, our impact factor was 3.2 and on 1 January 2024 we transitioned to a fully open access journal. We appreciate that submitting to journals can be overwhelming with each journal having different guidelines for submission. W ..read more

By: Nanuka Jalaghonia (Health Systems Global), Sandra Mounier-Jack (Health Policy and Planning) and Ami Bhavsar (Health Policy and Planning)   This supplement, a collaboration between Health Systems Global, the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research and Health Policy and Planning, is the result of mentorship programme to support early-career women conducting Health Policy and Systems Research in Low- and Middle- Income Countries. The program guided 13 mentor-mentee pairs from 16 different countries through an almost two-year-long journey in preparing a high-quality manuscrip ..read more

Dr Eti Rajwar1 and Prof Sandy Oliver2 1Public Health Evidence South Asia, Prasanna School of Public Health, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India 2EPPI Centre, Social Research Institute, University College London, UK                   August 2023   “Change is inevitable, growth is optional!”– John C Maxwell It is famously said that ‘Change is the only constant’ and it is the adaptation to this change that leads to growth and evolution. Over the years, we have witnessed many changes in health research ..read more

Health Policy and Planning launched a call for papers in 2020 on the basis of a Commentary in which we proposed a research agenda for Health Policy and Systems Research (HPSR) linked to COVID-19. The call led to a number of publications, which have ranged from studies on the effect of COVID-19 on the use of health services and on forgone care, to the role of trust in shaping perceptions of vaccination, mainstreaming gender in outbreak research, and inter-organisational coordination for better surveillance. Now, more than two years after the pandemic started, our overarching conc ..read more

By Dylan Walters (Nutrition International) and Sandra Remancus (Alive & Thrive) Every year, a lack of concerted support for breastfeeding from governments around the world costs the global economy more than US$570 billion. These losses, the cumulative result of child and maternal mortality, increased healthcare costs, and depleted human capital potential, are preventable through proactive efforts to support, protect and promote breastfeeding. Breastfeeding saves lives and safeguards development. It serves as a child’s first immunization, provides protection against common childhood illness ..read more

By Natasha Salaria (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) The 2021 impact factors have now been released and we are pleased to announce we have seen another increase in our impact factor which has gone up to 3.547 with our 5-year impact factor coming in at 4.423. Our journal sits 25th out of 88 in the Health Policy and Services category. We as a journal published over 200 articles in 2021, had over 1 million downloads in 2021 and have published papers from more than 90 countries in the past 3 years. The use of impact factors as measuring quality and impact of journals is widely con ..read more

By Uzma Khan (IRD Pakistan; Karachi, Pakistan and IRD Global; Singapore, Singapore) Since 2011, the World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended treating patients affected with drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) using a clinic- or community-based ambulatory care model. However, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) continue to struggle to implement this policy into practice. We recently published a study analyzing distance to health services as a factor contributing to poor treatment outcomes in peri-urban and rural areas of Pakistan and discussed pertinent challenges to decentralizatio ..read more

By Andrea Blanchard (University of Manitoba) & Neha Singh (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) Long and winding roads How can we answer some of the most complex questions in public health? As researchers, we often don’t go far enough to locate our understandings of specific, short-term pathways within the longer, winding journey to health impact. Among the impacts that remain important in the global Sustainable Development Goals and related national targets are reducing mothers’ and newborns’ mortality rates. Yet many have shied away from attempting to uncover how these are a ..read more

Background In a recently published Commentary in Health Policy and Planning, we discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic consequences have raised questions about the availability, design, implementation, and accountability of external assistance for health. We argue that these questions have made urgent the need for a fundamental rethink of how to conceptualize and implement external assistance such that it better aligns with and strengthens domestic health systems. This in turn is key for external assistance that will enable rather than undermine efforts to sustain th ..read more