Although Universal health coverage is a pillar of the modern welfare state, the successful design and implementation of arrangements to deliver on this promise faces enormous challenges.

This panel, with perspectives from health policy, law, and political science, examines these challenges and reflects on national experiences in developing countries. Topics will include: the imperatives of determining which healthcare products and services are covered; national and regional strategies for securing stable supplies of quality healthcare services at affordable prices; the relationship between the spread of patents on pharmaceutical products, a new phenomenon, and governments’ commitments to provide essential medicines; and the tensions between health technology assessment systems designed to make judgements on cost-effectiveness and legal systems that offer opportunities for individuals and groups to secure expensive health products via litigation.

Kalipso Chalkidou (@kchalkidou) is the Director of Global Health Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, and a Professor of Practice in Global Health at Imperial College London. Her work concentrates on helping governments build technical and institutional capacity for improving the value for money of their healthcare investment. Professor Chalkidou has been involved in the Chinese rural health reform and also in national health reform projects in the USA, India, Colombia, Turkey and the Middle East, working with the World Bank, PAHO, DFID and the Inter-American Development. Between 2008 and 2016 she founded and ran NICE International, a non-profit group within the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).

Ken Shadlen is Professor of Development Studies in the Department of International Development of LSE. He is currently Head of Department (September 2017-2020). Professor Shadlen works on the comparative and international political economy of development, with a focus on understanding variation in national policy responses to changing global rules. In recent years Professor Shadlen’s research has focused largely on the global and cross-national politics of intellectual property (IP). He is interested in the implications that the new global IP regime presents for late development, and the various ways that international norms for IP affect national practices. He is one of the Managing Editors of the Journal of Development Studies. He is the author of Coalitions and Compliance: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Patents in Latin America (OUP, 2017)

Daniel Wang is a Lecturer in Health and Human Rights at Queen Mary University of London. Before joining the School of Law at Queen Mary he was an LSE Post-doctoral Fellow (2012-2013) and taught at the University of Sao Paulo and at the Brazilian National School of Public Administration. Dr Wang’s research interests include Human Rights Law; Medical Law and Constitutional Law.

Justin Parkhurst (@justinparkhurst) is Associate Professor in Global Health Policy in the Department of Health Policy at LSE and an honorary Senior Lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He is Chair of the LSE Global Health Initiative as well as a member of the Thematic Working Group on Translating Evidence into Action with Health Systems Global. He is interested in global health politics and policy and the political aspects of the use of evidence to inform policy decisions. Dr Parkhurst has recently led a 5-year programme of work on Getting Research Into Policy in Health (the GRIP-Health programme) funded by the European Research Council.

The panel is brought together by the Global Health Initiative (@LSEGlobalHealth), a newly established cross-departmental research platform set up to increase the coherence and visibility of Global Health research activity across the School, both internally and externally. It provides support for interdisciplinary engagement and showcases LSE’s ability to apply rigorous social science research to emerging global health challenges

Twitter hashtags for this event: #LSEBeveridge #LSEFestival

This event is part of the LSE Festival: Beveridge 2.0 running from Monday 19 to Saturday 24 February 2018, with a series of events rethinking the welfare state for the 21st century and the global context.

Podcast 

A podcast of this event is available to download from Universal Health Coverage in the Global South: what is needed to make it work?

Podcasts and videos of many LSE events can be found at the LSE Public Lectures and Events: podcasts and videos channel.