Social solidarity and the right to health: essential elements for people-centred health systems

The right to health has been advanced as one of the key elements to creating pro-poor people-centred health systems (Hunt and Backman 2008; Gruskin et al. 2012). However, one of the challenges for realizing the right to health is the seeming conflict between public health utility and the entitlements afforded by a human rights approach to health. This dichotomy begs two sub-questions, both of which have relevance for building responsive health systems.

IHF 40th World Hospital Congress

The IHF 40th World Hospital Congress will be held 31 October – 3 November 2016 in Durban, South Africa with the theme: Addressing the Challenge of Patient-centered Care and Safety.

The World Hospital Congress of the International Hospital Federation (IHF) is a unique global forum that brings together key drivers of national and international policy, management, financial trends and solutions in healthcare management and service delivery. Through this forum multidisciplinary exchange of knowledge, expertise and experiences are facilitated, together with dialogue on best practices in leadership in hospital and healthcare management and delivery of services.

For further information please click here: IHF 40th World Hospital Congress

Good collaborative practice: reforming capacity building governance of international health research partnerships

In  line with the policy objetives of the United Nations sustainable Development Goals, this commentary seeks to examine the extent which provisions of international health research guidance promote capacity building and equitable partnerships in global health research. Theri evaluation finds that governance of collaborative research partnership, in resource- constrained settigns is limited but has improved with the implementation guidance of the International Ethical Guidelines for Health- related Research Involving Humans by The Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS 2016)

The patient perspective in health care networks

Health care organization is entering a new age. Focus is increasingly shifting from individual health care institutions to interorganizational collaboration and health care networks. Much hope is set on such networks which have been argued to improve economic efficiency and quality of care. However, this does not automatically mean they are always ethically justified. A relevant question that remains is what ethical obligations or duties one can ascribe to these networks especially because networks involve many risks. Due to their often amorphous and complex structure, collective responsibility and accountability may increase while individual responsibility goes down

Data value and care value in the practice of health systems: A case study in Uganda

In anthropology, interest in how values are created, maintained and changed has been reinvigorated. This case study, draws on this literature to interrogate concerns about the relationship between data collection and the delivery of patient care within global health. They followed a pilot study conducted in Kayunga, Uganda that aimed to improve the collection of health systems data in five public health centres and it´s observed that measurement, calculation and narrative practices could be assigned care-value or data-value and that the attempt to improve data collection within health facilities transferred ‘data-value’ into health centres with little consideration among project staff for its impact on care