The discipline of Health Policy and Systems Research – including teaching that reflects the principles and approach of this field – is unevenly developed around the world. Established HPSR practitioners have long known, and new entrants to the field soon learn, that language barriers are one of the major impediments to building networks, providing peer support and sharing materials.
Against this backdrop, it gives us great pleasure to announce that Health Policy and Policy Analysis – the oldest of the open access courses in the CHEPSAA portfolio, and one that students have consistently rated very highly over the years – is now available in French. The release of the French version of this course coincides with the 10th anniversary of its use in an open access format.

CHEPSAA’s online open access modules – Introduction to Complex Health Systems (ICHS) and Introduction to Health Policy and Systems Research (IHPSR) – now have a presence in 61 countries across the world.

This milestone was achieved in the period March - September 2017, thanks to downloads from Yemen, Japan, France, Ivory Coast, Spain, Somalia and Malaysia; 7 countries from where the materials had not been accessed before.

Five years have passed since CHEPSAA’s first curriculum development workshop, where we began the development of our first open access course, Introduction to Complex Health Systems (ICHS). Since 2014, ICHS and Introduction to Health Policy and Systems Research (IHPSR), our second open access course, have been run in July each year as part of the Winter School of the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. Understanding and Analyzing Health Policy (UAHP), a third open access course in the CHEPSAA stable, has been running for much longer.

This year, we asked a handful of Winter School students from Ghana, Zambia and South Africa to tell us about their jobs and to reflect on their experiences of attending the week-long IHPSR and UAHP courses, as well as the relevance of these courses to their careers.

This is what they had to say.

At the beginning of April, 28 researchers, educators and health system managers from 12 countries in Africa and Asia attended a workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa with the aim of sharing experience around CHEPSAA’s open access courses and exploring how these courses, as well as other courses that participants teach, can be adapted to better target leaders and strategic managers in the health system. The workshop was a collaboration between the Resilient and Responsive Health Systems (RESYST) research consortium and CHEPSAA. The rationale for and approach to the meeting was described here. In this blog, I report back on key discussions and anticipated next steps.

The development of health policy and systems research (HPSR) as a distinct field has opened a window of opportunity for the Philippines to promote an evidence-informed policy environment. We are pleased to share that CHEPSAA’s pioneering effort in developing training modules for HPSR is helping us mold future leaders in the Philippine health system who are well-aware of the need to ground health policies and programmes with rigorous research.

In a first for the continent, universities in West, East and South Africa, with the support of partners in the US and UK, are working on developing a Pan African Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) degree. This degree will have a focus on public health leadership in Africa and is aimed at current and potential strategic-level leaders who intend to advance a professional practice career in public health. In this blog, Irene Akua Agyepong tells us more about the rationale for this initiative, the programme's concept and components, as well as initial implementation steps in Ghana and Nigeria.