Research

Working Title & Methods of the IIASA YSSP Research Project

Assessing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Global Public Health Initiatives in the Strategic Context of Health System Strengthening. 

Can Disease-Specific Heath Funds Be Successfully Leveraged to Expand Global Public Health Good? 

Research Questions (Preliminary):

1. Are disease-specific health programs contributing to national health systems or are they diverting health resources into a siloed (vertical) program, which at best does nothing to improve the health of the global community and at worst erodes global public health by undermining national health systems in less developed nations, placing these countries at greater risk for being the breeding grounds of global pandemics?

2. How can funds for disease specific programs use their resources to not only achieve their disease-specific programmatic goals but also contribute to the global public good for health through health systems strengthening? 

Methodology (Preliminary):

1. Develop a health system index to measure each grant’s contribution to a number of components of the recipient nations health system based on the functional components of national health systems defined by the World Bank, WHO, and Toyako recommendations. Each grant proposal will receive a “health system score”.

Grant proposals approved prior to the 2009 changes to the Global Fund’s health systems strengthening strategy (rounds 1-7) will be compared with those funded after 2009 (round 8 and 9) to examine if the policy changes have succeeded in increasing the Global Fund’s implementation focus on health systems.

2. Using the Global Fund Project Reports, all of the grants will be coded and evaluated for their levels of effectiveness at achieving their programmatic goals as well as the sustainability of the activities included in the program.

Combining the health system score and the quantitative results from the systematic case review, analysis will be conducted to compare grants with various health systems scores with regard to their program effectiveness and sustainability. (This will only be possible for grants with progress reports funded in round 7 or earlier. So none of the newer grants will be included in this part of the analysis.)


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