Global Health Initiatives and Public Health Policy

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Global health initiatives (GHIs), which include new global health partnerships such as GFATM and GAVI, have become major funders of disease control in developing countries. These partnerships represent new governance models, which have enabled a wider set of actors, especially civil society, to engage in health policy processes at the global and country levels. Early country experiences of many GHIs, which include bilateral initiatives such as PEPFAR, are that they have established parallel systems, reversing efforts toward coordinated development assistance. In response, donor harmonization initiatives have been seeking to align the more complex set of actors in support of coordinated country disease control.

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Cited by (21)

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Ruairí Brugha is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health Medicine, at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He qualified as a medical doctor in 1980, worked for 6 years in Africa as a clinician and public health specialist during the 1980s and early 1990s, and trained in Public Health in the UK in the mid-1990s. He spent 10 years (1996–2005) at the Department of Public Health and Policy, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he was Head of the Health Policy Unit (2003–05).

Ruairí Brugha is an international health policy and systems specialist, with expertise in policy analysis, health systems analysis, public health, and epidemiology. Since 2001, his main area of research has been on the effects of Global Health Initiatives (GHIs) on country systems, notably the Global Fund four-country tracking study (2003–05). He has recently been awarded three new grants to study the country-level effects of GHIs, focusing on HIV/AIDS, and is coordinating, along with Professor Gill Walt, a research network that is supporting studies in 15 countries.

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