Policy formulation and adoption are poorly understood phases of the health policy process. We conducted a narrative synthesis of 28 articles on health policy in low- and middle-income countries to provide insight on what kinds of activities take place in these phases, the actors crafting policies and the institutions in which policy making occurs. The narrative synthesis involved an inductive p...

BACKGROUND Over the past decade, global health issues have become more prominent in foreign policies at the national level. The process to develop state level global health strategies is arguably a form of global health diplomacy (GHD). Despite an increase in the volume of secondary research and analysis in this area, little primary research, particularly that which draws directly on the perspe...

Many western industrialized countries are currently suffering from a crisis in health human resources, one that involves a debate over the recruitment and licensing of foreign-trained doctors and nurses. The intense public policy interest in foreign-trained medical personnel, however, is not new. During the 1960s, western countries revised their immigration policies to focus on highly-trained p...

This paper proposes an explanation concerning why some global health issues such as HIV/AIDS attract significant attention from international and national leaders, while other issues that also represent a high mortality and morbidity burden, such as pneumonia and malnutrition, remain neglected. The rise, persistence and decline of a global health issue may best be explained by the way in which ...

BACKGROUND In their adoption of WHA resolution 69.19, World Health Organization Member States requested all bilateral and multilateral initiatives to conduct impact assessments of their funding to human resources for health. The High-Level Commission for Health Employment and Economic Growth similarly proposed that official development assistance for health, education, employment and gender are...

BACKGROUND Interest and participation in global health activities among U.S. medical trainees has increased sharply in recent decades, yet the global health activities of physicians who have completed residency training remain understudied. Our objectives were to assess associations between individual characteristics and patterns of post-residency global health activities across the domains of ...

Shiffman rightly raises questions about who exercises power in global health, suggesting power is a complex concept, and the way it is exercised is often opaque. Power that is not based on financial strength but on knowledge or experience, is difficult to estimate, and yet it may provide the legitimacy to make moral claims on what is, or ought to be, on global health agendas. Twenty years ago p...

Over the past decade, growing recognition that weak health systems threaten global health progress has galvanised renewed global and national commitment to strengthening health systems (Hafner & Shiffman, 2012). Global health leaders from the World Health Organization to the GAVI Alliance, national governments and donors today endorse the goal of health system strengthening (HSS), though there ...

BACKGROUND Operations research (OR) is a discipline that uses advanced analytical methods (e.g. simulation, optimisation, decision analysis) to better understand complex systems and aid in decision-making. Herein, we present a scoping review of the use of OR to analyse issues in global health, with an emphasis on health equity and research impact. A systematic search of five databases was desig...

The Medical faculty in Mostar has been in existence since 1997. Establishing and developing a new school of medicine is a long, laborious and expensive process. The tripartite mission of medical school education, health care, and research, represents the three basic pillars of academic medicine. According to the Royal College of Physicians „academic medicine is the discovery and development of ...