This technical brief draws on the findings of the study to offer insights into what factors make it more or less likely that research will feed into policy and practice in Ghana. It also provides an up-to-date snapshot of the range of actors involved in conducting research in the country as well as their institutional profile. This learning aims to inform efforts by national governments, as well as funders, to develop and strengthen existing institutions towards enhanced uptake of research. The research in this technical brief is part of a multi-country study commissioned by the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research to understand the evidence-to-policy process around health decisions in Ghana, Ethiopia and Mozambique.

The research in this technical brief is part of a multi-country study commissioned by the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research to understand the evidence-to-policy process around health decisions in Ghana, Ethiopia and Mozambique. Through surveys and in-depth interviews with representatives from 54 locally based research institutions and 41 health policy-makers, the studies explored the entire chain of evidence generation, from conception of the research idea, through to its synthesis and dissemination. For each country, this included discussions with key actors involved in tracer policies. This technical brief distils regional lessons from the studies and offers a set of recommendations to support efforts to develop and strengthen existing institutions towards enhanced uptake of research.

Makes the case for systems thinking in an easily accessible form for a broad interdisciplinary audience, including health system stewards, programme implementers, researchers, evaluators, and funding partners.

Interest in implementation research is growing, largely in recognition of the contribution it can make to maximizing the beneficial impact of health interventions. As a relatively new and, until recently, rather neglected field within the health sector, implementation research is something of an unknown quantity for many. There is therefore a need for greater clarity about what exactly implementation research is, and what it can offer. This Guide is designed to provide that clarity. Intended to support those conducting implementation research, those with responsibility for implementing programs, and those who have an interest in both, the Guide provides an introduction to basic implementation research concepts and language, briefly outlines what it involves, and describes the many opportunities that it presents. The main aim of the Guide is to boost implementation research capacity as well as demand for implementation research that is aligned with need, and that is of particular relevance to health systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Research on implementation requires the engagement of diverse stakeholders and multiple disciplines in order to address the complex implementation challenges they face. For this reason, the Guide is intended for a variety of actors who contribute to and/or are impacted by implementation research. This includes the decision-makers responsible for designing policies and managing programs whose decisions shape implementation and scale-up processes, as well as the practitioners and front-line workers who ultimately implement these decisions along with researchers from different disciplines who bring expertise in systematically collecting and analyzing information to inform implementation questions. The opening chapters (1-4) make the case for why implementation research is important to decision-making. They offer a workable definition of implementation research and illustrate the relevance of research to problems that are often considered to be simply administrative and provide examples of how such problems can be framed as implementation research questions. The early chapters also deal with the conduct of implementation research, emphasizing the importance of collaboration and discussing the role of implementers in the planning and designing of studies, the collection and analysis of data, as well as in the dissemination and use of results. The second half of the Guide (5-7) detail the various methods and study designs that can be used to carry out implementation research, and, using examples, illustrates the application of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method designs to answer complex questions related to implementation and scale-up. It offers guidance on conceptualizing an implementation research study from the identification of the problem, development of research questions, identification of implementation outcomes and variables, as well as the selection of the study design and methods while also addressing important questions of rigor.

This volume analyzes Ghana s National Health Insurance Scheme and highlights the range of policy options needed to assure its financially sustainable transition to universal coverage.

Health systems are fluid and their components are interdependent in complex ways. Policymakers, academics and students continually endeavour to understand how to manage health systems to improve the health of populations. However, previous scholarship has often failed to engage with the intersections and interactions of health with a multitude of other systems and determinants. This book ambitiously takes on the challenge of presenting health systems as a coherent whole, by applying a systems-thinking lens. It focuses on Malaysia as a case study to demonstrate the evolution of a health system from a low-income developing status to one of the most resilient health systems today. A rich collaboration of multidisciplinary academics working with policymakers who were at the coalface of decision-making and practitioners with decades of experience, provides a candid analysis of what worked and what did not. The result is an engaging, informative and thought-provoking intervention in the debate. This title is Open Access.

Against a turbulent background of decreasing resources and increasing demand, the rise of the market and the substantial change inthe role of the state, technological progress, emerging democracies, war and civil conflict, health policy makers and system managers must carry on, obtain adequate resources and allocate them wisely. This text identifies some of the important issues in the development and reform of health policies and systems, and the kind of research needed.