Person-centred health care: a critical assessment of current and emerging research approaches.

Rationale, Aims And Objectives: Person-centred health care is prominent in international health care reforms. A shift to understanding and improving personal care at the point of delivery has generated debates about the nature of the person-centred research agenda. This paper purviews research paradigms that influence current person-centred research approaches and traditions that influence knowledge foundations in the field.

Part 2 - primary health care workforce policy intricacies: multidisciplinary team¹ case analysis.

Objective: To demonstrate the usefulness of theoretical framework in the analysis of complex policy issues related to primary health care (PHC) workforce for informed policy decisions and planning.

Approach: The study links complexity theories with political economy and connects them to theoretical work on structure and agency to guide the analysis of the PHC workforce issues and their related ramifications. This theoretical framework guides as well the literature review.

W(h)ither complexity? The emperor's new toolkit? Or elucidating the evolution of health systems knowledge?

Rationale: The outputs from vastly expanding health research and knowledge industry with a broadening range of approaches to the synthesis of knowledge provide an impetus to develop complex science and theory-informed knowledge management in health care. Aims To stimulate debate in order to assist health care decision makers to move beyond framing certainty and evidence in purely reductionist terms.

Objectives: To locate health, health care and health knowledge systems research using a complex adaptive systems theory framework.

Part 1--unravelling primary health care conceptual predicaments through the lenses of complexity and political economy: a position paper for progressive transformation.

Objective: To disentangle the concepts of primary health care and primary care as well as their conceptual and empirical ramifications for progressive transformation.

Methods: over 400 international and interdisciplinary abstracts and papers with 96 annotated bibliography abstracts of literature across multiple dimensions relating to the knowledge base around mechanisms in PHC development were reviewed. The text is confronted with the reality, as it exists in the field and makes the case for complexity perspectives to assess this phenomenon in its context.