AIDS in the UK: the making of policy, 1981–1994

Making Research Matter; Comment on “Public Spending on Health Service and Policy Research in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States: A Modest Proposal”

We offer a UK-based commentary on the recent “Perspective” published in IJHPM by Thakkar and Sullivan. We are sympathetic to the authors’ call for increased funding for health service and policy research (HSPR). However, we point out that increasing that investment – in any of the three countries they compare: Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom– will ipso facto not necessarily lea...

South Africa’s COVID-19 Alcohol Sales Ban: The Potential for Better Policy-Making

Competing Logics and Healthcare; Comment on “(Re) Making the Procrustean Bed? Standardization and Customization as Competing Logics in Healthcare”

This paper offers a short commentary on the editorial by Mannion and Exworthy. The paper highlights the positive insights offered by their analysis into the tensions between the competing institutional logics of standardization and customization in healthcare, in part manifested in the conflict between managers and professionals, and endorses the plea of the authors for further research in this...

Situation of Linkage between Sexual and Reproductive Health and HIV-Related Policies in Islamic Republic of Iran – A Rapid Assessment in 2011–2

The number of sexual transmission of HIV is increasing globally. Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) issues and HIV/AIDS related problems are rooted in common grounds such as poverty, gender inequality, and social exclusion. As a result, international health organizations have suggested the integration of SRH services with HIV/AIDS services as a strategy to control HIV and to improve people’s ...

Mitigating Evidentiary Bias in Planning and Policy-Making; Comment on “Reflective Practice: How the World Bank Explored Its Own Biases?”

The field of cognitive psychology has increasingly provided scientific insights to explore how humans are subject to unconscious sources of evidentiary bias, leading to errors that can affect judgement and decision-making. Increasingly these insights are being applied outside the realm of individual decision-making to the collective arena of policy-making as well. A recent editorial in this jou...

We Need to Talk About Corruption in Health Systems

The health sector consistently appears prominently in surveys of perceived corruption, with considerable evidence that this has serious adverse consequences for patients. Yet this issue is far from prominent in the international health policy discourse. We identify five reasons why the health policy community has been reluctant to talk about it. These are the problem of defining corruption, the...