Globalization Health
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Globalization Health · Jan 2014
Development assistance for health given to Nepal by China and India: a comparative study.
Development assistance for health (DAH) promotes health development in low and middle income countries. China and India, as emerging donors, have scaled-up their DAH programs during the recent years. Nepal, as a neighboring country to China and India, has witnessed the history and development of China's and India's DAH. ⋯ China's and India's insistence on a recipient-driven mechanism keeps the aid programs aligned with Nepal's health development plan and respects Nepal's "ownership". China can learn from India to start the development assistance for health related NGOs and public health intervention.
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Globalization Health · Jan 2014
Trade and investment liberalization and Asia's noncommunicable disease epidemic: a synthesis of data and existing literature.
Trade and investment liberalization (trade liberalization) can promote or harm health. Undoubtedly it has contributed, although unevenly, to Asia's social and economic development over recent decades with resultant gains in life expectancy and living standards. In the absence of public health protections, however, it is also a significant upstream driver of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) including cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes through facilitating increased consumption of the 'risk commodities' tobacco, alcohol and ultra-processed foods, and by constraining access to NCD medicines. In this paper we describe the NCD burden in Asian countries, trends in risk commodity consumption and the processes by which trade liberalization has occurred in the region and contributed to these trends. We further establish pressing questions for future research on strengthening regulatory capacity to address trade liberalization impacts on risk commodity consumption and health. ⋯ Trade liberalization is a significant driver of the NCD epidemic in Asia. Increased participation in trade agreements requires countries to strengthen regulatory capacity to ensure adequate protections for public health. How best to achieve this through multilateral, regional and unilateral actions is a pressing question for ongoing research.
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Globalization Health · Jan 2014
mHealth and global mental health: still waiting for the mH2 wedding?
Two phenomena have become increasingly visible over the past decade: the significant global burden of disease arising from mental illness and the rapid acceleration of mobile phone usage in poorer countries. Mental ill-health accounts for a significant proportion of global disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and years lived with disability (YLDs), especially in poorer countries where a number of factors combine to exacerbate issues of undertreatment. Yet poorer countries have also witnessed significant investments in, and dramatic expansions of, mobile coverage and usage over the past decade. ⋯ Existing and developing mH(2) technologies represent an underutilised resource in global mental health. If development, evaluation, and implementation challenges are overcome, an integrated mH2 platform would make significant contributions to mental healthcare in multiple settings and contexts.
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Globalization Health · Jan 2014
Proposing a sequential comparative analysis for assessing multilateral health agency transformation and sustainable capacity: exploring the advantages of institutional theory.
This article proposes an approach to comparing and assessing the adaptive capacity of multilateral health agencies in meeting country and individual healthcare needs. Most studies comparing multilateral health agencies have failed to clearly propose a method for conducting agency comparisons. ⋯ To more affectively understand and explain why some multilateral health agencies are more capable of adapting to country and individual healthcare needs, SCA provides a methodological approach that may help to better understand why these agencies are so different and what we can learn from successful reform processes. As funding challenges continue to hamper these agencies' adaptive capacity, learning from each other will become increasingly important.
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Globalization Health · Oct 2013
Strengthening the evidence-policy interface for patient safety: enhancing global health through hospital partnerships.
Strengthening the evidence-policy interface is a well-recognized health system challenge in both the developed and developing world. Brokerage inherent in hospital-to-hospital partnerships can boost relationships between "evidence" and "policy" communities and move developing countries towards evidence based patient safety policy. ⋯ A co-developed approach to evidence-policy strengthening with seven components is described, with reflections from early implementation. This rapidly expanding field of enquiry is ripe for shared learning across continents, in keeping with the principles and spirit of health systems development in a globalized world.