National clinical audit for hospitalised exacerbations of COPD.

Introduction: Exacerbations of COPD requiring hospital admission are burdensome to patients and health services. Audit enables benchmarking performance between units and against national standards, and supports quality improvement. We summarise 23 years of UK audit for hospitalised COPD exacerbations to better understand which features of audit design have had most impact.

Public-private partnering as a modus operandi: Explaining the Gates Foundation's approach to global health governance.

In its first decade, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) focused much of its efforts on enabling the establishment of transnational public-private partnerships (PPPs) oriented towards increasing low-income country (LIC) access to essential health technologies. Critics have argued these efforts further enriched already profitable firms which long ignored the needs of populations with limited purchasing power, while lessening political will to invest in urgently needed public sector capacity to produce essential health technologies independently of market pressures. Missing from these critical analyses were the perspectives of those shaping BMGF's global health programming.

Public health over private wealth: rebalancing public and private interests in international trade and investment agreements.

The emerging global trade and investment regime is a site of ongoing contestation between states, powerful industry actors and civil society organisations seeking to influence the formation of legal rules, principles, practices and institutions. The inclusion of major transnational tobacco, alcohol and ultraprocessed food companies seeking to influence governments in these processes has resulted in the expanded distribution and consumption of unhealthy commodities across the globe, overshadowing many of the positive impacts for health hypothesised from liberalised trade. The growing number of pathways for market actors to exert undue influence over national and international regulatory environments provided by agreements, such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, has given many cause to be concerned.

Engagement or dismissiveness? Intersecting international theory and global health.

International relations theorists and global health politics scholars largely fail to communicate with one another. We argue that drawing on insights from classic and contemporary international theory more explicitly will positively augment the study of global health politics. This paper highlights four major theoretical orientations in the international relations literature (realism, neoliberal institutionalism, constructivism, and feminism) and discusses how an understanding of these perspectives can strengthen our understanding of global health policy.

Private actors, global health and learning the lessons of history.

Private business and philanthropic organizations have played a prominent role in the response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the support of global health governance more broadly. While this involvement may appear to be novel or unprecedented, this article argues that this active role for private actors and philanthropies actually mirrors the historical experience of cross-border health governance in the first half of the twentieth century. By examining the experiences, roles and criticisms of the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Division and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it is possible to identify potential opportunities for better cooperation between public and private actors in global health governance.