Health Systems Collaborative

Strengthening health systems is key to achieving the new UN Sustainable Development Goals through universal coverage with high quality health care. The Health Systems Collaborative (HSC) is led in Oxford by Professor Mike English and Professor Sassy Molyneux working together with a senior team including Dr Chris Paton, Dr Jake McKnight, Dr Sebastian Fuller and Dr Shobhana Nagraj. With different backgrounds and expertise, they often work as a multidisciplinary research team with LMIC scientists and collaborators from Oxford, the UK more widely and globally. These teams typically also include LMIC and Oxford PhD/DPhil students drawn from a range of academic backgrounds. Research approaches are representative of Health Policy and Systems Research, Health Services and Delivery Research and Implementation Science and typically employ multiple or mixed methods to evaluate complex interventions (the HSDN project being one example).
Read the publication 'Lessons from a Health Policy and Systems Research programme exploring the quality and coverage of newborn care in Kenya' on the BMJ Global Health website.

Ongoing work

• The Kenyan Clinical Information Network that links 22 hospitals as an example of a low cost ‘learning health system’ to support quality improvement and conduct observational and interventional research
  Read the publication 'Approaching quality improvement at scale: a learning health system approach in Kenya' on the BMJ Archives of Disease in Childhood website.
• A system Strategy to Optimise Neonatal Inpatient Care (SONIC) that is exploring large scale change efforts and outcomes from survival, quality and safety of care, staff wellbeing to families’ experiences; this work also encompasses a collaboration to evaluate the NEST360 programme in Kenya
  Read the publication 'Programme theory and linked intervention strategy for large-scale change to improve hospital care in a low and middle-income country - A Study Pre-Protocol' on the Welcome Open Research website.
  Visit the NEST360 website
• Harnessing Innovation in Global Health to improve Quality of Care (HIGH-Q), a programme of work evaluating the implementation of technologies in Kenyan hospitals, including how this affects nurses’ and families’ experiences, how enhancing nurse staffing may influence all these important aspects of quality, how human centred design may help the development of better technologies and the governance of technology introduction
• Implementation research focused on the development and introduction of new technologies in Vietnam as part of the VITAL flagship.
  Visit the VITAL project page on the OUCRU website
• The challenges with infection prevention and control and conduct of microbiological surveillance in hospitals as a key issue in preventing emergence of antibiotic resistance
• The potential of mHealth tools to provide Life-saving Instruction For Emergencies (LIFE) and support patients’ access to affordable, quality laboratory diagnostic services
  Visit the website LIFE: life-saving instruction for emergencies
• The challenges facing health workers in LMIC and the intersection between health service redesign and future human resources for health planning.

Learning Event facilitated by the Health Systems Collaborative in September 2022