background although there is a general agreement on the benefits of evidence informed health policy development given resource constraints especially in low-income countries (lics), the definition of what evidence is, and what evidence is suitable to guide decision-making is still unclear. our study is contributing to filling this knowledge gap. we aimed to explore health policy actors’ views r...

the global health agenda has been dominating the current global health policy debate. furthermore, it has compelled countries to embrace strategies for tackling health inequalities in a wide range of public health areas. the article by robert and colleagues highlights that although globalization has increased opportunities to share and spread ideas, there is still great asymmetry of power accor...

we argue that the field of health policy and management (hpam) ought to confront the gap between theory, policy, and practice. although there are perennial efforts to reform healthcare systems, the conceptual barriers are considerable and reflect the theory-policy-practice gap. we highlight four dimensions of the gap: 1) the dominance of microeconomic thinking in health policy analysis and desi...

health systems have entered a third era embracing whole systems thinking and posing complex policy and management challenges. understanding how such systems work and agreeing what needs to be put in place to enable them to undergo effective and sustainable change are more pressing issues than ever for policy-makers. the theory-policy-practice-gap and its four dimensions, as articulated by chini...

gorik ooms recently made a strong case for considering the centrality of normative premises to analyzing and understanding the underappreciated importance of the nexus of politics, power and process in global health. this critical commentary raises serious questions for the practice and study of global health and global health governance. first and foremost, this commentary underlines the impor...

background: around one out of two mothers give births by cesarean section (cs) surgery in iran and about half of this number is due to previous cs. recently health sector evolution (hsep) program (started in april 2014) targets the high rate of cs in iran. to assess the impact of the interventions, we emphasized that the first birth cesarean (fbc) proportion is one of the main indicators to ass...

background and objectives: high performance research activity in the health domain is crucial to overcoming ever-growing health-related problems. despite availability of data sources, only a limited number of researchers use these data to derive health-related information. thus, the present study aimed at exploring the barriers to research promotion as perceived by the university health researc...

it is difficult to disagree with the general argument that successful health reform requires a significant degree of policy capacity or that all players in the policy game need to move beyond self-interested advocacy. however, an overly broad definition of policy capacity is a problem. more important perhaps, health reform inevitably requires not just policy capacity but political leadership an...