Calling for examples of great research on human resources for health
By Kerry Scott, Asha George, Uta Lehmann, Raeda AbuAlRub, Luis Huicho, Ligia Paina
Do you know of excellent health policy and systems research publications on human resources for health (HRH)? Perhaps work from your own team or colleagues? Or an older paper you always go back to, that you wish everyone would read? If you have taken or taught a health policy and systems course, maybe there was an assigned reading that changed the way you thought about HRH or beautifully applied a research methodology to answer an important HRH question?
We’re looking for submissions for a reader that provides guidance on and examples of excellent HRH research within the broader rubric of people-centred health policy and systems research. Please submit your suggestions here!
Please recommend research articles that:
- Have an HRH focus
- Demonstrate a range of HPSR approaches
- Highlight work from LMICs, or draw from other geographic contexts
- Are published in a peer reviewed journal or book
- Empirical research
- Systematic reviews
- How to / methodological articles
- Languages: Open to all suggestions for now
- All dates
In August, we launched work on the reader with our first blog announcing the project. Since then, over 40 people from 22 countries have indicated an interest in playing a variety of roles, from suggesting articles that could be included, to drafting summaries or assisting with dissemination. You can join the effort here. Extensive and highly constructive feedback from this group enabled us to develop an outline of the reader, available here. We’re now seeking support in crowdsourcing publications that showcases articles across a range of health policy and systems research typologies (figure 1) and that illustrate the range of HRH topics we plan to cover in the reader (figure 2).
Figure 1: Seeking articles across a range of HPSR typologies
Figure 2: Seeking articles across a range of HRH topics
After receiving your suggestions we will develop a selection system to choose a few top articles across typologies and topics, and then seek re-print permissions from the publishers to include them in the reader. Although we won’t be able to include every crowd sourced suggestion in the reader, we plan to make use of them all through curating supplementary resource lists that can be disseminated in alternative channels, such as through blogs.
People are at the heart of health systems, and people-centred research on human resources for health enables us to understand how actors, including community members, patients, health workers, managers, policymakers and researchers, exercise their creative and dynamic agency. These actors shape and are shaped by intersecting social and political structures—not only the health system itself, but also the community, professional boards and associations, trade unions and other sectors. Rigorous, ethically attuned, and relevant research can inform the development and implementation of health policy, enable the experiences of stakeholders across the health system to be heard, and even challenge established paradigms or shift the lines of debate and advocacy. The reader aims to strengthen HRH research for this endeavour.
We hope you’ll join us in advancing people centred HRH research to strengthen health policy and systems!
