Assessing communities of practice in health policy: a conceptual framework as a first step towards empirical research.

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are groups of people that interact regularly to deepen their knowledge on a specific topic. Thanks to information and communication technologies, CoPs can involve experts distributed across countries and adopt a 'transnational' membership. This has allowed the strategy to be applied to domains of knowledge such as health policy with a global perspective.

[Leadership and vision in the improvement of universal health care coverage in low-income countries].

In Burkina Faso, as in most developing countries, the operational level of the health system is made up of Health Districts (HDs), the activities of which are typically coordinated by the District Team (DT). Assessing the the core functions of DTs, as described by WHO, shows two important weaknesses. Firstly, instructions from "above" are often implemented rather passively: DTs tend not to display much leadership.

Sub-Saharan Africa and the health MDGs: the need to move beyond the "quick impact" model.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were defined in 2001, making poverty the central focus of the global political agenda. In response to MDG targets for health, new funding instruments called Global Health Initiatives were set up to target specific diseases, with an emphasis on "quick win" interventions, in order to show improvements by 2015. In 2005 the UN Millennium Project defined quick wins as simple, proven interventions with "very high potential short-term impact that can be immediately implemented", in contrast to "other interventions which are more complicated and will take a decade of effort or have delayed benefits".

Removing user fees for health services in low-income countries: a multi-country review framework for assessing the process of policy change.

Several authors have stressed the fact that many policy reforms fail because of poor formulation or implementation. On the other hand, the health financing literature provides little guidance to policy makers in low-income countries on how to implement a health care financing reform in ways that enhance its chance of achieving policy objectives, even less so for a user fee removal reform. This paper presents the framework used for a multi-country review of the policy process of removing user fees in six sub-Saharan African countries.

Removing user fees in the health sector: a review of policy processes in six sub-Saharan African countries.

In recent years, governments of several low-income countries have taken decisive action by removing fully or partially user fees in the health sector. In this study, we review recent reforms in six sub-Saharan African countries: Burkina Faso, Burundi, Ghana, Liberia, Senegal and Uganda. The review describes the processes and strategies through which user fee removal reforms have been implemented and tries to assess them by referring to a good practice hypotheses framework.

Viewpoint: When the 'non-workable ideological best' becomes the enemy of the 'imperfect but workable good'.

This brief paper addresses some of the difficulties inherent in international ideological approaches to solving the complex problems of health care financing and delivery in poor countries using Ghana as an example. It concludes with an appeal for problem solving approaches involving informed debate as to optimal ways forward to solve low income country health financing woes that are open minded about possible options rather than vested in particular positions.