In light of the recent blog by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that focused on household emergency preparedness for the zombie apocalypse and other disasters like hurricanes, I began to ask myself whether health systems can prepare for similarly complex disasters (1). […]
Category: Tracey Koehlmoos
Tracey Koehlmoos: The tide is turning for the private sector in developing countries
You cannot live in Dhaka, where I live and work, without seeing the necessity of the private sector for health. The private sector provides the overwhelming majority of outpatient curative care, while the public sector is used for a larger proportion of hospital deliveries and preventive care. For example, about 90% of care for children with […]
Tracey Koehlmoos on open versus free access: lesson learnt
Out of the blue on 28 March my colleagues and I received notification that all Lancet journals are now available to everyone in Bangladesh. As you can imagine, this is excellent news for those of us who like to read the Lancet so that it did feel a little like Christmas especially for the systematic review […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: Non-communicable diseases and bringing the fishbowl to Bangladesh
I am not going to lie. I love planning conferences and meetings although as a serious scientist, I do not think I am supposed to think and feel this way, but I do. Why? As my Hirsch score indicates, I spend a lot of time writing papers that no one reads except for the editors […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: Measles eradication – lofty goal or major distraction?
Immunization really is the bread and butter work of global public health, so that many of us engaged in global health trace our roots to vaccination campaigns for polio or, for the most venerable, smallpox. My first job was as an international monitor and observer on the measles campaigns in Nepal. I still have projects […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: Providing healthcare for the homeless in Dhaka, Bangladesh
Street dwellers, as homeless people are called locally, are ubiquitous in Dhaka. As a health systems researcher, much of my work is far removed from the people around me. Things like systematic reviews, knowledge translation platforms, and capacity building seem to have little immediate impact on the ultrapoor, but recently we completed a small project […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: Loss of access to global health journals in Bangladesh and beyond
Earlier this week, my organization was blindsided by the news that 2500 journals were being withdrawn from access using HINARI. For anyone unfamiliar with HINARI, it is an acronym for Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initative. This was established by the World Health Organization to grant access to free or low cost biomedical and health […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: Arrive alive – road traffic fatalities in Bangladesh
Two weeks ago, while travelling outside of Dhaka, I passed the remnants of an accident that had left a man dead on the road. It was a jarring sight and like most events in Bangladesh, there was an enormous crowd. However, this was not the first such accident that I have seen. […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: Murmur of methodological tension at the Symposium
The First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research ended on a crescendo of upbeat promise on the 19th of November, but amid all of the excellence of organisation, content, energy and enthusiasm, there was a murmur of methodological tension between the positivists and social scientists. […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: From the first global symposium on health systems research
I must confess that I am at a meeting…again. This time I am at the long awaited First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research. I am in Montreux with more than a thousand people from around the globe who do what I do, which is try to figure out how societies can best organise themselves […]