Global Forum for Health Research 2009, Havana, Cuba

Welcome to the blog for Forum 2009, taking place this week in sunny Havana!

The theme of the meeting, innovation, is the lifeblood of research. Without it, countries never truly develop a thriving science base and are relegated to the shadow of innovative neighbours.

It’s appropriate then that scientists from around the world have gathered in Cuba to discuss scientific and technological innovation.

Political circumstances have forced Cuban researchers to innovate and develop with homegrown talent. The question now is how these lessons can be translated to the rest of Latin America – and to Africa and Asia.

Transferring knowledge isn’t the only issue of course – developing countries need to create an innovation-friendly environment for researchers to thrive in.

I’ll be writing more about how to bridge these knowledge gaps, through better knowledge translation and South-South collaboration, for example.

Another issue that I’ll write about this week is innovation in health systems research. This is an enormously tricky topic in global health. We know that developing countries need better health systems but we know very little about the science of how to improve them.

Tim Evans, assistant director-general for for information, evidence and research at the WHO and TDR scientist Shenglan Tang are leading sessions this week on health systems research as a prelude to the first global symposium on health systems research that they are hosting next November in Switzerland.

Over dinner last night, Evans maintained that innovation is most urgently needed in health systems research. It’s certainly true that while funders and big pharma fall over themselves to pump money into research for drugs and vaccines, few line up to pour money into developing an evidence-base for improving health systems.

Do you agree? We’d like to hear your thoughts on the top priorities in innovation for developing countries. Comment below to share your ideas.

Priya Shetty, SciDev.Net, priya4876@gmail.com

Bamako ‘Call to Action’ unites 69 countries on health research

[BAMAKO] Ministers from across the developing world say they want to take control of their own health research agendas as part of a wish list presented at the Global Ministerial Forum on Research for Health yesterday (19 November).

Launching the much-awaited ‘Call to Action’ at the closing event of the Forum they said they want to prioritise policies dealing with research for health and improve coordination between ministries so that their respective countries can have more ownership of research.

Read the full story on SciDev.Net

Global health’s ′Cinderella′

Described as the ″Cinderella″ of global health by chair Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, the session on non-communicable diseases (NCD) certainly shared the topic’s luck.

Technical problems struck first when a video from Ala Alwan, WHO assistant director-general of non-communicable diseases and mental health, on ″After Bamako: Taking the agenda forward″ was unable to be played.

Noise from a couple of rooms off the back of the hall where the session was being held also plagued the talk, although the sharp questions that were asked during Q&A showed that the audience hadn’t allowed that to distract their attention from the speakers.

Horton also pointed out that ″if NCD is Cinderella, mental health is the ugly stepsister″; for while WHO has recently developed a programme for tackling NCDs, mental health is still not being given the attention it deserves. Especially when depression is among the top three causes of disability around the world.

One of the speakers, Sania Nisthar, president of non-governmental agency Heartfile, Pakistan, also brought up the interesting situation where researching NCDs in her country has indirectly led to the improvement of the health information system.

For example, morbidity surveys are based on assessment of risk factors rather than actual cause of death as overlapping diseases make it difficult to accurately define the cause of death.

Data on these risk factors are integrated into general demographic surveys due to resource constraints. Researchers using this data have discovered gaps in the data collection, which has resulted in them reviewing and refining the methods of national health data collection in order to facilitate their own research into NCDs, thus improving the health information system.

Shiow Chin Tan, SciDev.Net

Getting it out there

Given the choice, would the average scientist prefer to find a cure for tuberculosis or find a really effective way of getting it to people? It is the concentration on the former that Ok Pannenborg, a senior health advisor at the World Bank, highlighted this morning at Bamako 2008 in a plenary session on research for health challenges.

Health systems research, he said, is unsexy. Health systems are seen as “amorphous, abstract and vast”. How can anyone go about researching such things?

The key, he said, is not to see it as disease versus health systems research, or even disease research alongside health systems research – but focusing on better health systems for the treatment of disease.

Research, he said, is an indispensible tool for improving health systems, from identifying and understanding problems to developing and evaluating new ways of doing things.

But it’s not just in health systems that finding out how to best deliver things to people is key. Health is not just about healthcare, said Michael Marmot, chair of the WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, in a video presentation during a later session.

Research into the social determinants of health has shown what can lead to poor health. It’s acting on this evidence which is the next step, said Marmot. We know that clean water is good for people’s health, let’s find a way of getting it to people.

Katherine Nightingale, SciDev.Net