Friday Newsletter
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Dear Centre Leaders,
In today's newsletter:INDEPTH team participates in Harvard climate change workshops
  • Former Dodowa Centre Leader honoured with Heroine of Health award
  • Global health estimated over two decades
  • Impoverishment effects of out-of-pocket healthcare payments in Ghana
  • Consultancy Opportunities
1. Former Dodowa Centre Leader honoured with Heroine of Health award
Professor Margaret Gyapong, UHAS
The Director of the Centre for Health Policy and Implementation Research of the University of Health and Allied Sciences (UHAS) in Ghana, Professor Margaret Gyapong, has been honoured with the General Electric (GE) Heroine of Global Health award.

The former Director of the Dodowa Health Research Centre, an INDEPTH member centre, was one of the 13 emerging women leaders in global healthcare who were awarded at the first ever ‘Heroine of Health’ honours organised as part of the World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland on Sunday. 
Read more
2. Global health estimated over two decades
Prof. Peter Byass, INDEPTH SAC Chair
The Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD), which began in 1992, is an ongoing project that aims to estimate the impact that diseases, injuries and risk factors have on health and mortality worldwide, by country and over time. Twenty years ago, in four papers published in The Lancet, Murray and Lopez described findings from an early iteration of the GBD. The papers estimated causes of death and disability worldwide in 1990, and projected how patterns were likely to change in subsequent decades. This work formed the basis for the contemporary GBD, which was recently described5 as a “GPS for global health”.

In this paper in which he mentions INDEPTH "In Retrospect: Global health estimated over two decades", Prof. Peter Byass (who is the INDEPTH SAC Chair), argues that despite subsequent advances, better integration of data systems and models is still needed. In 2010, the INDEPTH Executive Director Osman Sankoh called for a collaboration between international institutes that do these global estimates with local institutes in his paper "Global health estimates: stronger collaboration needed with low- and middle-income countries."(PLoS Med 7(11):e1001005). Read more
3. Impoverishment effects of out-of-pocket healthcare payments in Ghana
Dr. James Akazili (lead author)
There is a global concern regarding how households could be protected from relatively large healthcare payments which are a major limitation to accessing healthcare. Such payments also endanger the welfare of households with the potential of moving households into extreme impoverishment. This paper "Assessing the impoverishment effects of out-of-pocket healthcare payments prior to the uptake of the national health insurance scheme in Ghana" examines the impoverishing effects of out-of-pocket (OOP) healthcare payments in Ghana prior to the introduction of Ghana’s national health insurance scheme.

Findings show that without financial risk protection, households can be pushed into poverty due to OOP healthcare payments. Even relatively richer households are impoverished by OOP healthcare payments. This paper presents baseline indicators for evaluating the impact of Ghana’s national health insurance scheme on impoverishment due to OOP healthcare payments. 
Read more
News from Centres
 1.  Nairobi HDSS/APHRC:
      Consultancy Opportunities
The African Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC) is looking for consultancy service to support In-Country Validation activities and research assistants - immunization and health financing.
  1. TOR1
  2. TOR2
Policy Engagement and Communications