TDR and WHO’s Global Health Ethics team have jointly developed a training course for researchers and research ethics committees on the important ethical considerations in implementation research (IR). The course comprises six interactive modules interspersed with activities including case studies, role-play and quizzes: Module 1: Introduction to IRModule 2: Ethical considerations in IRModule 3: Ethical […]
While the idea of decolonizing global health has gained prominence recently, it is not new. Discussions about the impact of the colonial legacy on health systems began with the end of the colonial system. A discussion among academics, activists, health practitioners, and others, that is taking on new urgency, as actors look to identify and […]
The field of Health Policy System Research (HPSR) offers us valuable theorisations and empirical work to guide us on how we can engage with the complex social, economic and political nature of health systems today. However, the field has not been able to fully grapple with the blind spots that are ever present in our reality. […]
This problem of consulting malpractice is merely one facet of a larger issue of how global health, even today, is still colonial in many ways, and how high-income country experts and institutions are valued much more than expertise in low- and middle-income countries. This article makes suggestions on how global health consulting can be decolonised. Pai M (2019) 10 […]
In a Viewpoint in the Lancet, experiences of censorship in donor-funded evaluation research were shared. The authors warned about a potential trend in which donors and their implementing partners use ethical and methodological arguments to undermine research. Reactions to the Viewpoint—and lively debate at the 2018 Global Symposium on Health Systems Research—suggest that similar experiences are common in implementation […]
No one likes a parachute researcher: the one who drops into a country, makes use of the local infrastructure, personnel, and patients, and then goes home and writes an academic paper for a prestigious journal. This Lancet article suggests some ways in which this can be avoided and some of the ethical issues associated with […]
This editorial is based on the author’s experiences as a journal editor, and an academic who has been a local researcher and a foreign researcher. It is also based on a constructed ‘ideal’ of how things might have been without global health research partnerships, and when (circa late 19th to mid-20th century) many of the countries […]
Countries in the Global South continue to struggle to train and retain good researchers and practitioners to address local, regional and global health challenges. As a result, there is an ongoing reliance on the Global North for solutions to local problems and an inability to develop alternative approaches to problem solving that take local (non-northern) […]
In this book Madison Powers and Ruth Faden develop an innovative theory of structural injustice that links human rights norms and fairness norms. Norms of both kinds are grounded in an account of well-being. Their well-being account provides the foundation for human rights, explains the depth of unfairness of systematic patterns of disadvantage, and locates […]
Community engagement is gaining prominence in global health research. Growing consensus about the importance of community representation and participation for ethical research means research institutions and funding bodies now promote, or even mandate, engagement with communities as an important component of “traditional” non-participatory health research projects. In practice, however, global health research priority-setting is dominated […]