Research

Public Healthcare Division

Strengthening health systems through research, monitoring and evaluation.

PHD

The Public Healthcare Division is a unique and important development for all health service stakeholders and the wider community. Its research encapsulates continuous improvement of quality, safety and care outcomes through enabling leadership, research, innovation, audit and quality improvement, and the association aims to become a national leader in healthcare excellence, enabled by the integration of research, innovation, practice and education. It works with partners to spread innovations, build capability and catalyze policy changes so that everyone has safe and high-quality healthcare.

The division is the primary voice for public health advocacy, and leads the way to protect people and their communities from preventable, serious health threats. It strives to ensure that community-based health promotion, disease prevention activities and preventive health services are accessible to everyone, and it represents a broad array of health providers, educators, environmentalists, policymakers and health officials.

The association is also working on other critical public health issues including public health and emergency preparedness, food safety, hunger and nutrition, climate change and other environmental health issues, public health infrastructure, disease control, international health and tobacco control.

The association combines local capacity with global knowledge to empower public and private health sector workers to improve access to quality health services for the people they serve, bringing together health professionals, researchers, policy advisors and management experts.

Mission and vision

The division's mission is to unite, inspire and enrich interdisciplinary leadership that progresses healthcare management, providing the highest quality technical assistance backed by operational research.

Its vision is to be a homegrown leader in research and programme implementation in the field of health, and to provide global solutions locally through reliable research and project implementation while maintaining partnerships with leading global players in public health.

Goals

To educate the public health workforce by enhancing their competence and skills in public health practice
To improve public health science, practice and leadership by establishing and maintaining partnerships and working relationships with other agencies and organizations
To provide managerial, programmatic and technical support to central and regional governments and international organizations involved in the delivery and evaluation of public health services

Objectives

To provide educational opportunities and continuing education for public health professionals and those interested in public health
To maintain and enhance professional knowledge, increase technical proficiency and enable members to promote public health
To advance quality improvement in both health care delivery and public health, through texts on standards, education programmes and policies that promote quality improvement across public health systems
To contribute to the elimination of preventable deaths by deploying proven hospital and community-based interventions in target communities in the developing countries
To create advanced research and technology capability in healthcare technologies
To carry out research with industrial focus and impact, and develop the next generation of researchers in healthcare innovation
To translate technologies so they are adopted by industry

How the division works

Evidence-based and interdisciplinary
Understanding the processes of implementing and spreading innovations
Encompassing different types of innovation across multiple levels of healthcare systems
Addressing different external and organizational contexts for innovation spread and implementation
Assessing patient and public involvement in embedding innovations

Services

Research for new insights and innovative solutions to health problems
Informing, educating and empowering people about health issues
Mobilizing community partnerships and action to identify and solve health problems
Developing policies and plans that support individual and community health efforts
Providing collaboration for community services
Monitoring health status to identify and solve community health problems
Linking people to needed personal health services and assuring the provision of health care when otherwise unavailable

Areas of expertise

The division specializes in health care analysis, policy research, and the monitoring and evaluation of health programmes. It has a strong concern for ensuring the voice of vulnerable and marginal communities is heard by public health programme planners and policymakers. It sets safety standards to protect workers and develops school nutrition programmes to ensure children have access to healthy food and healthcare, and works on eliminating health inequality, emergency preparedness, food safety, hunger and nutrition, climate change and other environmental health issues, public health infrastructure, disease control, international health and tobacco control.

The division produces research which supports practitioners, policy-makers and other stakeholders facing the complex challenges of embedding healthcare innovations, that is, implementing innovations sustainably and at scale. Its research aims to develop the evidence base for improving the sustainable implementation and spread of healthcare innovations by identifying generalisable aspects and mechanisms of the way such innovations are adopted, adapted and embedded across different contexts, connecting the introduction of innovations to the shifting work patterns and organizational changes required to scale and sustain them in practice.

The division provides the interdisciplinary approach needed to analyse, evaluate and improve this dynamic process of embedding innovation, working across academic fields such as health sciences, organisational studies, implementation research and social sciences, and deploying a range of methodological tools including the tracking of innovation journeys over time and cross-sectional comparison of innovations.

Focus areas

What the division researches

Health systems strengthening

The division works with the Ministry of Health to strengthen the performance of the health system at central and regional levels to improve population health outcomes, focusing on the health system building block of human resources for health. This is done through the provision of continuous professional development activities and research on key challenges in the health sector.

The association helps ensure that frontline health providers have the most up-to-date medical guidelines, along with the training, mentoring and coaching needed to deliver high-quality services. The division also helps identify and address barriers that prevent people from accessing high-quality health services, including ensuring adequate supplies of commodities, and organizing health services to be efficient and client-focused.

The association works with partners to build equitable health systems and achieve goals related to universal health coverage, including improving the availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality of services, advancing research and innovation, and promoting sustainability.

Monitoring and evaluation research

Monitoring and evaluation are essential management tools which help to ensure that health activities are implemented as planned, and to assess whether desired results are being achieved. The association develops the capacity to undertake monitoring and evaluation operational research to identify health service delivery gaps.

The association is therefore primarily placed to interrogate the basis for, and make recommendations for, public health advocacy and public policy. It has developed key partnerships with academic, research and public policy organizations in the region to further this objective, helping to ensure that healthcare programmes and services are effective, efficient and responsive to the health needs of communities.

Working alongside local governments, healthcare organizations and communities, the association is improving health policies, access and outcomes, and focuses on improving health outcomes in the developing countries by supporting innovative programmes and partnering with local organizations.

Research and evaluation

The association focuses on research and evaluation around population and community health, supporting the delivery of effective, evidence-based strategies and interventions where inequalities are at their most acute.

It offers a multi-disciplinary approach to research and enterprise activities, including at practitioner level, and seeks to support the process of decision making and outcomes through sound research across a range of organisations and stakeholders.

The association's particular interests are around epidemiology, environmental health, housing, population ageing, the history of public health, public health nutrition, the effectiveness of interventions, and arts and health. Its emphasis on public health in practice uses a range of methodologies appropriate to meet research needs in complex settings, in the development of ever more effective strategies and interventions to deliver effective change where it is most needed.