Management im Gesundheitswesen

Developing methods for the African Health Observatory – Platform on Health Systems & Policies (AHOP)

The African Health Observatory – Platform on Health Systems & Policies (AHOP) is a collaborative initiative of the World Health Organization Regional Office for Africa (AFRO), the London School of Economics (LSE), and the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). AHOP will support the establishment of a regional platform that will promote evidence-informed policy-making in the African Region, drawing on experiences of the European Observatory. AHOP will establish a collaboration with National Centres of Excellence in five countries (Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal) to produce Health System in Transition (HiT) reviews, policy briefs, and cross-country studies.

HiTs are country-based reports that provide a detailed description of each health care system and of reform and policy initiatives in progress or under development. In order to facilitate comparisons between countries, HiT reviews are based on a template, which provides detailed guidelines and specific questions, definitions and examples needed to compile a report. In order to assure that HiTs produced by AHOP are tailored to the needs of African policy-makers, methods and templates of the European Observatory for writing HiTs need to be adjusted to the African context.

The Department of Healthcare Management has been commissioned by the European Observatory to perform the adjustment of the HiT template for the African Region. The project will involve four main groups of activities falling into the following areas: (1) Performing two systematic reviews (of existing templates and data sources for the African Region), (2) carrying out a series of workshops (with African researchers, policy-makers, and collaborating National Centres), (3) adjusting the template, and (4) project management and coordination. Most of these activities will contribute to revising the use of comparative data, potentially leading to simultaneous improvements of the template of the European Observatory. All activities will be performed in close collaboration with the European Observatory, and – as far as possible – with the African Health Observatory (AHO), and designated National Centres of the AHOP.