Health Equity: 01/15/08

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

[EQ] Revitalizing Health for All - Research and Research Training in PHC

Revitalizing Health for All:

A Call for Expressions of Interest to Participate in New Research and Research Training in

Comprehensive Primary Health Care

The Globalization and Health Equity Research Unit at the Institute of Population Health - University of Ottawa

English version: http://www.globalhealthequity.ca/electronic%20library/Call%20for%20Expressions%20of%20Interest%20CPHC.pdf

Spanish version: http://www.globalhealthequity.ca/electronic%20library/Solicitud%20de%20declaration%20de%20interes%20APSI.pdf

Deadline 31 March 2008

“…..In 2007, an international network of researchers and people involved in building comprehensive primary health care (CPHC) received funding to support research and research capacity-building. This network, associated with the People’s Health Movement, includes individuals in India, Africa, Latin America, Europe, Canada and Australia.

By comprehensive primary health care, we mean an approach to health systems organization and services that tries to achieve the following:

a. increased equity in access to health care and other services/resources essential to health

b. reduced vulnerabilities through changes in community empowerment (capacities)

c. reduced exposures to risk through changes in social and environmental determinants of health

d. improved participatory mechanisms and political capabilities of marginalized population groups reached by comprehensive primary health care initiatives

e. increased community resilience to enable effective responses to promote and protect health

f. equitable increase in population health outcomes

With funding support from the Canadian Global Health Research Initiative and its ‘Teasdale-Corti’ Research Program, our project goals are to:

a. systematically review recent past experiences of comprehensive primary health care from different regions of the
world to determine what we know about how it works, what it needs to work and what it has accomplished 3

b. train up to 20 early career primary health care researchers in undertaking new or augmenting existing
CPHC research studies, in teams with ‘research users’ (health policy or program planners) and research
mentors (experienced CPHC researchers)

c. provide financial support to these research teams to undertake their proposed studies

d. support the building of regional networks of researchers and research users (including civil society groups)
to advance comprehensive primary health care as the basis for health system reform in their own countries

e. create a rigorously sound knowledge base on the role of comprehensive primary health care in improving
health equity that can be used in the advocacy work of these regional networks

Call for Expressions of Interest

The project is now seeking applications (‘Expressions of Interest’) from research teams committed to developing important new knowledge and action on comprehensive primary health care. These research teams will come from one of four different areas/regions in which are focusing our overall project work:

Region 1: India and South Asia

Region 2: Africa

Region 3: Latin America

Region 4: Indigenous/Aboriginal peoples in Canada and Australia

Timeline:

31 March 2008: Deadline for Expressions of Interest

September – November 2008: Two week training program (see ‘Proposed Venues and Dates for Regional
Training Programs’ at end of this Call for Expressions of Interest)

October 2008 – November 2010: New funded research studies

September – November 2009: First regional meeting and 3 day Training Program

September – November 2010: Second regional meeting

Sometime in 2011: A global meeting on overall project results (to be determined, based on obtaining new funding

Contact Information:

Corinne Packer, Researcher, PhD - Institute of Population Health - University of Ottawa

Email: cpacker@uottawa.ca - tel:  (613) 562-5800 ext. 2053 - fax:  (613) 562-5659

1 Stewart Street, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1N 6N5

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This message from the Pan American Health Organization, PAHO/WHO, is part of an effort to disseminate
information Related to: Equity; Health inequality; Socioeconomic inequality in health; Socioeconomic
health differentials; Gender; Violence; Poverty; Health Economics; Health Legislation; Ethnicity; Ethics;
Information Technology - Virtual libraries; Research & Science issues. [DD/ IKM Area]

“Materials provided in this electronic list are provided "as is". Unless expressly stated otherwise, the findings
and interpretations included in the Materials are those of the authors and not necessarily of The Pan American
Health Organization PAHO/WHO or its country members”.
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[EQ] Counting and Multidimensional Poverty Measurement

Counting and Multidimensional Poverty Measurement

Sabina Alkire University of Oxford

James Foster, University of Vanderbilt and University of Oxford

Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative - OPHI Working Paper 7 December 2007

Department of International Development - Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford

Available online as PDF file [32p.] at: http://www.ophi.org.uk/pubs/Alkire_Foster_CountingMultidimensionalPoverty.pdf

“…..This working paper proposes a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of: (i) an identification method that extends the traditional intersection and union approaches, and (ii) a class of poverty measures that satisfies a range of desirable properties including decomposability.

The identification step makes use of two forms of cutoffs: first, a cutoff within each dimension to determine whether a person is deprived in that dimension; second, a cutoff across dimensions that identifies the poor by counting the number of dimensions in which a person is deprived. The aggregation step employs the FGT measures, appropriately adjusted to account for multidimensionality.

The identification method is particularly well suited for use with ordinal data, as is the first of our measures, the adjusted headcount ratio. The paper also provides illustrative examples from Indonesia and the US to show how our methodology might be used in practice…..”

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[EQ] Measuring The Health Of Nations

Measuring The Health Of Nations: Updating An Earlier Analysis

Ellen Nolte and C. Martin McKee, London School of Hygiene and TropicalMedicine

HEALTH AFFAIRS - Vo l u m e 2 7, Nu m b e r 1 – January/ February 2008

Full text: http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/27/1/58

“…..The paper represents another metric through which health systemperformance might reasonably be gauged. This work measures theextent to which deaths that would not have occurred but forthe presence of effective health care have been reduced amongOrganization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)countries over time. Cause for concern can be seen in the authors’finding that despite being the most prolific health care spender,the United States is falling farther behind its peer nationsin overall health system performance, as measured by what theauthors term "amenable mortality."

We compared trends in deaths considered amenable to health carebefore age seventy-five between 1997–98 and 2002–03in the United States and in eighteen other industrialized countries.Such deaths account, on average, for 23 percent of total mortalityunder age seventy-five among males and 32 percent among females.The decline in amenable mortality in all countries averaged16 percent over this period. The United States was an outlier,with a decline of only 4 percent. If the United States couldreduce amenable mortality to the average rate achieved in thethree top-performing countries, there would have been 101,000fewer …”

“…..IDENTIFYING SIMPLE, PRACTICAL, AND UNDERSTANDABLE ways to assesshealth system performance, with its complex interlinked dimensions,remains a challenge. Health systems are complex, with multiplefunctions, and performance assessment frameworks are increasinglyusing a range of indicators to better capture these differentaspects.¹

A fundamental issue relates to how to attribute population healthoutcomes to health care. One approach uses mortality data, whichare readily available at a population level in many countries,and is based on the concept of "amenable mortality," referringto deaths from certain causes that should not occur in the presenceof timely and effective health care.² Originally developed inthe 1970s in the United States, the concept was subsequentlyadopted and updated by many researchers, especially in Europe,where it has been used to assess the quality of health caresystems.³ This concept been revitalized recently as a potentiallyuseful tool to assess the quality and performance of healthsystems and track changes over time…”.⁴

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