Revitalizing Health for All: A Call for Expressions of Interest to Participate in New Research and Research Training in Comprehensive Primary Health Care
Background
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 opportunities 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
The ideals of comprehensive primary health care were first launched internationally by the 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration on Primary Health Care. This Declaration was partly based on earlier primary health care successes in significantly lowering infant, childhood and maternal mortality rates and creating over all population health improvements in many parts of the developing world.
Since the Alma-Ata Declaration, however, most health systems reform in much of the world has been driven by 'selective' (single-disease or intervention focused) primary health care, and by increased marketization of health care services (e.g. user fees, privatization). This has led to increasingly complex, inefficient and inequitable health systems driven by an ever larger number of special 'global health initiatives.' Resulting problems of sustainability in selective primary health care programs, and the weakening of public health systems and their capacities to work intersectorally on the determinants of health and with communities in more authentic forms of partnership, has led to calls for the renewal of comprehensive primary health care by the World Health Organization, the Pan-American Health Organization, and health ministries and civil society groups around the world.
Our Project
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
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
f. strengthen the People's Health Movement in being a global voice for comprehensive primary health care
Call for Expressions of Interest
Our 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
Who?
Each team will be made up of:
an early career researcher (someone who is just beginning to study primary health care)
a 'research user' (someone who is working in health systems developing or implementing primary health care policies or programs, and who is in a sufficiently senior position to make or influence decisions based on new research knowledge)
a mentor (a more senior researcher with experience in research on CPHC, health systems, health and development or other related social development area)
Research teams could come from universities, governments, non-governmental organizations or any other group that is involved in primary health care. At least one of the team members must work in an organization legally eligible to receive research grant funding.
What will participation in the project entail?
Each team will prepare a first draft of an Expression of Interest (essentially an outline of a research proposal) that will address an important question, or set of questions, about comprehensive primary health care. The proposals will be reviewed by members of our project coordinating group.
Up to 6 of these proposals from each of our four regions will be funded to attend a 2 week training program in 2008 on researching comprehensive primary health care. Research users will be encouraged to attend for the full 2 weeks, but where this is not possible it is essential that they attend the first week. During this 2 week training program, research teams will have an opportunity to develop their proposals in greater detail. Teams supported directly through this initiative will also be provided with some financial support to conduct their research. Teams not selected for this support may be invited to participate in the training program and subsequent regional meetings on a cost-recovery basis. Due to limited funding available through this initiative, all invited teams (whether funded by the initiative or participating on a cost-recovery basis) will be asked to indicate in their Expression of Interest what other sources of funding they already have, or may be able to access.
All teams who attended the first year training program will also be expected to attend a 3 day follow-up training programs in 2009, which will be accompanied by a 1 day regional meeting on CPHC. They will also be expected to attend a second regional meeting in 2010.
There will be four separate sets of training programs, one for each of the four regions.
Table 1: Regionally-adjusted Maximum Stipends
Region 1: India and South Asia
Up to 5 applications will be accepted. Each will be granted a stipend of a maximum
CAD 17,200 for the length of the project (per team)
Region 2: Africa
Up to 5 applications will be accepted. Each will be granted a stipend of a maximum
CAD 24,200 for the length of the project (per team)
Region 3: Latin America
Up to 5 applications will be accepted. Each will be granted a stipend of a maximum
CAD 24,200 for the length of the project (per team)
Region 4: Indigenous/Aboriginal peoples in Canada and Australia
Up to 6 applications will be accepted. Each will be granted a stipend of a maximum
CAD 27,300 to cover the length of the project (per team)
For information regarding the application, which is due 31 March 2008, please contact:
Nikki Schaay
The School of Public Health
University of the Western Cape
Cape Town, South Africa.
mailto:schaay@mweb.co.za