Health Equity: 05/12/08

Monday, May 12, 2008

[EQ] Aid, Incentives, and Sustainability

Aid, Incentives, and Sustainability

An Institutional Analysis of Development Cooperation

Elinor Ostrom, team leader; Clark Gibson, Sujai Shivakumar, Krister Andersson

Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis - Stockholm

The Swedish Agency for International Development Cooperation, Sida Studies in Evaluation

Available online PDF [389p.] at: http://www.sida.se/shared/jsp/download.jsp?f=Stud02-01.pdf&a=2429

The first purpose was to review “the state-of-the-art” as regards the existing knowledge about incentives and aid

The second purpose of the study was to identify areas, in regard to the relationship between aid, incentives, and sustainability

The third purpose of the study was to suggest an approach as to how to evaluate the relationship between aid, incentives, and sustainability

In addition to the three broad purposes of the study, we were also asked to complete several specific tasks:

To answer the following questions in regard to the literature on how aid, incentives, and sustainability may be related:

• What do we know about incentives and aid?

• What do we specifically know about how aid, incentives, and sustainability are related?

• What theoretical models and empirical methods have been employed in these analyses and what are the experiences?

CONTENT:

PART I: Introduction

1 The Problems of Aid, Incentives, and Sustainability

PART II: Theoretical Foundations

2 Understanding Potentially Unproductive Operational Situations

3 Changing Operational Rules in Policy Situations: What are the Incentives?

4 Incentives across Situations: The International Development Cooperation Octangle

5 Focusing on a Part of the Octangle: An Institutional Analysis of Donor-Recipient Negotiations

6 Incentives in the Modalities and Characteristics of Development Cooperation

PART III: Empirical Studies

7 How Does Sida’s Internal Organization Affect the Incentives for Stakeholder Performance in Partner Countries?

8 Incentives for Contractors in Sida-Supported Activities

9 Sida in India
PART IV: Conclusions

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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/ KMS Area]

“Materials provided in this electronic list are provided "as is".Unless expressly stated otherwise, the findings
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Health Organization PAHO/WHO or its country members”.
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[EQ] Going from evidence to recommendations

Rating quality of evidence and strength of recommendations:

Going from evidence to recommendations

Gordon H Guyatt, professor¹, Andrew D Oxman, researcher², Regina Kunz, associate professor³, Yngve Falck-Ytter, assistant professor⁴, Gunn E Vist, researcher², Alessandro Liberati, associate professor⁵, Holger J Schünemann, associate professor⁶, for the GRADE Working Group

¹ CLARITY Research Group, Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada L8N 3Z5, ² Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services, Oslo, Norway, ³ Basel Institute of Clinical Epidemiology, University Hospital Basel, Basel, Switzerland, ⁴ Division of Gastroenterology, Case Medical Center, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA, ⁵ University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and Agenzia Sanitaria Regionale, Bologna, Italy, ⁶ Department of Epidemiology, CLARITY Research Group, Italian National Cancer Institute Regina Elena, Rome, Italy
BMJ 2008;336(7652):1049 -10 May 2008 - doi:10.1136/bmj.39493.646875.AE

Available online at: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/336/7652/1049

The GRADE system classifies recommendations made in guidelines as either strong or weak.
This article explores the meaning of these descriptions and their implications for patients, clinicians, and policy makers

“…..This is the third of a series of five articles describing the GRADE approach to developing and presenting recommendations for management of patients. In it, we deal with how GRADE suggests clinicians should interpret the strength of a recommendation.

What do we mean by strength of recommendation?

The strength of a recommendation reflects the extent to which we can, across the range of patients for whom the recommendations are intended, be confident that the desirable effects of an intervention outweigh the undesirable effects. Alternatively, in considering two or more possible management strategies, a recommendation’s strength represents our confidence that the net benefit clearly favours one alternative or another.

Desirable effects of an intervention include reduction in morbidity and mortality, improvement in quality of life, reduction in the burden of treatment (such as having to take drugs or the inconvenience of having blood tests or going to the doctor’s office for monitoring), and reduced resource expenditures. Undesirable consequences include adverse effects that may have a deleterious impact on morbidity, mortality, or quality of life or increase use of resources….”

Related articles:

What is "quality of evidence" and why is it important to clinicians?

Gordon H Guyatt, Andrew D Oxman, Regina Kunz, Gunn E Vist, Yngve Falck-Ytter, Holger J Schünemann for the GRADE Working Group
BMJ 2008 336: 995-998. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

GRADE: an emerging consensus on rating quality of evidence and strength of recommendations

Gordon H Guyatt, Andrew D Oxman, Gunn E Vist, Regina Kunz, Yngve Falck-Ytter, Pablo Alonso-Coello, Holger J Schünemann for the GRADE Working Group
BMJ 2008 336: 924-926. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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    IMPORTANT: This transmission is for use by the intended recipient and it may contain privileged, proprietary or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient or a person responsible for delivering this transmission to the intended recipient, you may not disclose, copy or distribute this transmission or take any action in reliance on it. If you received this transmission in error, please notify us immediately by email to infosec@paho.org, and please dispose of and delete this transmission. Thank you.

[EQ] Health and Foreign Policy: survey of educational and training initiatives

Health and Foreign Policy: survey of educational and training initiatives

Global Health Programme – The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies

Geneva May 2008

Website: http://graduateinstitute.ch/executive/training-workshops/global-health-diplomacy.html

“…Health is an important, yet still broadly neglected, long-term foreign policy issue and needs a stronger strategic focus on the international agenda (cf. Bulletin of the World Health Organization (WHO). In consequence, there needs to be a better understanding of health among diplomats, foreign affairs specialists as well as academics but also a better understanding of foreign policy by the public health community. Addressing this gap, the Graduate Institute for example has launched an executive education programme in global health diplomacy.

In order to get an overview of this relatively young field of research and in the context of a working agreement with the WHO, the Global Health Programme of the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies Geneva is conducting an survey of educational and training initiatives around the world that aim to address the need to establish closer links between health and foreign policy, links commonly subsumed by the terms “health diplomacy” or “health foreign affairs”.

This survey is addressed to both schools of public health and schools of foreign relations as well as a range of other educational institutions and initiatives.

We are thus addressing ourselves to you and would like to ask you to support this survey by briefly commenting on the following points:

• Please let us know if you have established programmes in this area or are conducting courses that primarily
address issues such as health and foreign policy, health and security, international health law, health diplomacy
and the like. This also includes the national training programmes for diplomats.

• Please also indicate to us what kind of student body your educational initiatives are targeted at. It is of particular
interest to us if you are creating learning environments that bring students and/or practitioners from both public
health and foreign policy together.

We have not developed a questionnaire as we are sure that your initiatives will be documented on your respective websites –
so all we ask you to do is to guide us to appropriate URLs.
We would be very happy though if you were also to share with us any information that is not easily accessible yet – like for example a plan to start such a programme. Of course we will share the results of our work with you.

Please respond to: globalhealth@graduateinstitute.ch

This study is conducted in the context of the Oslo Ministerial Declaration – global health: a pressing foreign policy issue of our time
It can be accessed under
http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/ud/Aboutthe-Ministry/Minister-of-Foreign-Affairs-Jonas-Gahr-S/Speeches-andarticles/2007/lancet.html?id=466469

From: Professor Dr. Ilona Kickbusch
Director Global Health Programme

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    IMPORTANT: This transmission is for use by the intended recipient and it may contain privileged, proprietary or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient or a person responsible for delivering this transmission to the intended recipient, you may not disclose, copy or distribute this transmission or take any action in reliance on it. If you received this transmission in error, please notify us immediately by email to infosec@paho.org, and please dispose of and delete this transmission. Thank you.