caption Credit: World Bank/ Masaru Goto (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Teaching and Learning

The Teaching and Learning (T&L) Thematic Working Group (TWG) is organized around ways to improve the teaching and learning of Health Policy and Systems Research (HPSR). This is a period of growth of the field of HPSR, with innovation and new developments in a wide variety of HPSR methods and applications. There is a pressing need to better define the field of HPSR and improve the capabilities of teaching institutions and tutors to teach and apply HPSR, and to keep up with these new developments. There is also an increasing demand for qualified HPSR teachers, trainers and practitioners by governments, public health, clinical and other organizations and stakeholders in health systems.

There have been dramatic changes in the learning technologies available to teach and assess learning, forcing educational organizations to re-think how they teach, train or build capacities as well as why they teach the way they do, that are intimately linked to the strategic roles of education in the development of health systems. Furthermore, there is evident gap in teaching and capacity building research in field of HSPR which requires attention proposed by the TWG.

This TWG aims to continue offering spaces where these issues can be discussed, teaching materials and pedagogical tools shared, and the ability to research, network and collaborate with those involved in the educational mission of teaching and learning HPSR. This Thematic Working Group aims to continue providing networking and support to those involved in the educational mission of teaching and learning HPSR as well as create a platform to build the field of HPSR. The TWG aims to support adapting new methods of teaching, building national health system capacities to face the evolving pandemics that challenged health systems.

Objectives

  • Provide an interdisciplinary forum for teachers, students, education administrators, trainers and those interested in the teaching and learning of HPSR to collaborate and share information about the scope of the field, educational approaches, curriculum development, pedagogical techniques, teaching and learning materials, innovations in teaching and learning, HPSR research, and other capacity building issues related to the teaching and learning of HPSR.
  • Develop and implement a strategy to support Health Systems Global membership (particularly early career researchers via the Emerging Voices for Global Health TWG) in the area of teaching and learning HPSR, including the oversight of a section at the biennial Global Symposium on Health Systems Research.
  • Provide a platform for knowledge sharing and dissemination on teaching and learning HPSR, using web-based strategies, and by producing special issues of journals on teaching and learning HPSR.
  • Promote dissemination and exchange of information amongst students and faculty; trainers and learners; between educational institutions; development organizations; and governments in the area of teaching and learning HPSR.
  • Strengthen HPSR in LMICs. There is a critical lack of capacity in many LMICs institutions, which hampers embedding research and program evaluation in the policy process. Retention of young and promising researchers is especially problematic and undermines country capacity.

Activities

Key activities include hosting webinars, workshops, meetings at global events, regional activities, and the development and hosting of the HPSR training database. The T&L TWG also aims to develop and maintain a repository for materials on teaching and learning HPSR, including curricula, syllabi, competencies, lectures, case studies, and other learning and examination materials, seeking to identify their strong points and gaps.

News and views

News and views

Access the latest blog posts and news items from the Teaching and Learning TWG.

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Facilitators

Gina Teddy

Gina Teddy

Co-Chair

Ayat Abu-Agla

Ayat Abu-Agla

Co-Chair

Gina Teddy

Gina Teddy

Co-Chair

Gina Teddy has been the co-chair for the T&L TWG since 2018. She is the founder and former Director for the Centre for Health Systems and Policy Research (CHESPOR) at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA). Gina coordinates HPSR courses and provides capacity training programs targeting health managers and leaders at GIMPA and the University of the Western Cape School of Public Health Winter School. Gina is a health systems practitioner and an implementation researcher with particular interest in promoting Health Policy and Systems Research (HPSR) across the African Region. She completed her post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Cape Town’s prestigious Health Policy and Systems Division two years after her PhD at the University of York, England. Gina has expertise in HPSR, governance and leadership, health management and capacity building, policy analysis and implementation science, health financing and inter-sectoral action and multi-disciplinarity. Her work has since informed a wide range of actors in the health sector from global to district levels.

Ayat Abu-Agla

Ayat Abu-Agla

Co-Chair

Ayat has a PhD in Global Health from Trinity College Dublin, and is a consultant community physician, public health specialist and implementation research scientist. Ayat has over 15 years specialist expertise in global health, reproductive health, implementation science, health systems (HS) and health workforce (HWF) in post conflict and LMICs gained through positions in healthcare, academia and professional associations. Her work has informed HS and HWF reform through the performance measurement of community midwife and HWF migration management policy in Sudan. Based at the headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO), she currently provides specialised HWF technical support to Global Health Workforce Network (GHWN) and the WHO-led secretariat for the joint OECD ILO and WHO Working for Health Programme, with HS/HWF operations in over 14 LMICs.

Publications and resources

As the field of health policy and systems research (HPSR) continues to grow, there is a recognition of the need for training in HPSR. This aspiration has translated into a multitude of teaching programmes of variable scope and quality, reflecting a lack of consensus on the skills and practices required for rigorous HPSR. The purpose of this paper is to identify an agreed set of core competencies for HPSR researchers, building on the previous work by the Health Systems Global (HSG) Thematic Working Group on Teaching & Learning.

This report covers the main activities carried out during 2016 by the Teaching and Learning TWG.

An update from the Teaching and Learning TWG dated the fourth quarter 2017.