The African Health Observatory Platform on Health Systems and Policies (AHOP) is a collaborative partnership to support and promote the transfer of evidence and experience between countries to foster better policies and action for improved health and wellbeing.
During the period November 2023 to March 2024 our International Science Partnership Funded activity will comprise work across our core outputs (policy dialogues, policy briefs and country profiles) and capacity building activity core to the platform’s emphasis on peer-to-peer learning across the partnership.
Policy Dialogue: In December 2023 the WHO Country Office will host a policy dialogue on Task Shifting in Surgery in collaboration with the Ethiopian Ministry of Health and AHOP National Centre teams, LSE and WHO AFRO. The dialogue will follow AHOP’s rigorously refined policy dialogue approach and comprise a highly focused event with a small group of policymakers and key stakeholders offering a platform for knowledge exchange and mutual learning. A pre-read will be prepared to share evidence on best practice in task shifting in the region and beyond, based on a scoping review. Curated discussion will then explores the issues raised, drawing in cross cutting perspectives from key stakeholders (clinicians, policy makers, academics etc) from Ethiopia and Nigeria and the wider regional and global context. During the period, we will also finalise a report on the dialogue for circulation to attendees and more widely as appropriate and reflect on impact and learning to feed into future dialogues.
Policy Brief: During the period, AHOP’s Nigeria National Centre team and an editor at LSE will be working on a planned policy brief on the lessons learnt from governance strategies used during the Covid-19 pandemic in Nigeria. Following AHOP’s carefully developed policy brief template, the brief will synthesise evidence on governance strategies used, their impact on in-country responses, and draw out lessons learnt to inform future policy decisions on health system governance and preparedness. The brief will draw on comparative learning where possible to inform reflections on the Nigerian health system and policy environment. NC authors and editor will produce iterative drafts of the brief, an external reviewer will peer review the text once finalised, and then author and editor teams will work with an external copy editor and the LSE and AFRO design, production and translation teams to finalise and publish the brief to the WHO’s IRIS publications database.
Country Profiles: We are in the process of producing 5 country profiles – comprehensive assessments of individual country health systems and services, following a standardised, regionally contextualised template that enables cross country comparison. During the period, in-country authors based across the five AHOP National Centres (Kenya, Ethiopia, Senegal, Rwanda and Nigeria) and editors based at LSE and WHO AFRO will undertake iterative drafting and editing of all chapters. The LSE series editor will read across chapters to ensure consistency and standardisation in template adherence and data presentation and external experts will be asked to input to improve readability, content accuracy and consistency, and data presentation. We will also work with a designed to finalise the presentation of the core data tables and figures across the five profiles.
Peer-to-peer learning: During the period we will continue to provide capacity building support to the partnership. This will include a bilateral visit to the Rwandan National Centre team by the LSE country point person and their WHO AFRO counterpart. The visit will focus primarily on supporting further development of the country profiles, working with the author team to address content, data and drafting issues. In addition, to further support development of the country profiles across the partnership, LSE will facilitate an online applied skills workshop bringing together regionally based national centre teams to share best practice on a) identifying and honing key messages for both policy briefs and country profiles, and b) planning and populating a dissemination plan for AHOP's country profile outputs to maximise uptake and policy impact. The session will be prepared by an external communications expert working in conjunction with LSE and WHO AFRO communications staff who will lead delivery.