National conference on Evidence into Public Health Policy

2nd National conference on bringing Evidence into Public Health Policy (EPHP 2012).

Theme : “Strengthening Health Systems to achieve Universal Health Coverage in India”

Location: Bangalore, India.

Conference dates: 5th and 6th of October 2012.

Abstract submission dates: June 15, 2012.

Organisers: Institute of Public Health, Bangalore, India; Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium

Conference Collaborators: National Health Systems Resource Center (NHSRC), National Rural Health Mission, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India; State Health Systems Resource Center (SHSRC) National Rural Health Mission, Government of Karnataka.

The main objectives of the conference

• Disseminate the concepts of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and Health Systems (HS) in the Indian context.
• Disseminate and review the evidence of research and implementation experiences of health systems strengthening at the National and State Level.
• Provide a platform to bring together policy makers, practitioners and researchers to reflect on issues related to Health Systems and Universal Health Coverage. 

Thematic Areas
The main themes for the conference will focus on the role of Service Provision & Delivery, Governance, Financing, Human Resources, Technology and Information systems for strengthening / restructuring health systems at various levels by different sectors for achieving Universal Health Coverage.  Emphasis would be on role and involvement of communities in each of these thematic areas.  Keeping this focus, the conference attempts to answer some of the key questions listed below.

• What does strengthening of health systems actually mean? What are the contributing and limiting factors that affect this process of strengthening health systems?
• How should Health Services be organised and delivered for ensuring affordable, accessible and acceptable care for all? What role that public and private sector need to play towards this?
• What should the mix of services be? Who should provide it? How do we measure it?
• How to improve access to vulnerable populations like SC/ST, religious minorities, poor, those living in remote areas? How do we measure it?
• What are the important Governance issues (e.g. administrative, accountability, regulatory, monitoring, corruption, etc) and how they affect delivery of health services and health care?
• How can health services be financed? What are the problems with the existing financing mechanisms of health care in India? What are some of the proven effective and equitable arrangements to finance health care? How does one protect households from catastrophic health expenditure leading to impoverishment?
• What are the possible pre-payment mechanisms to ensure minimum out-of-pocket expenditure and what are the organisational changes required for effective demand side financing in India? How do we measure it?
• What are the requirements in terms of human resources (quantity and quality); medicines and consumables; infrastructure; etc? What do experience and evidence tell us? What are the systems and resources required for achieving UHC? Is more of the same enough?
• What is the role of the community in organising health services? How participatory our health systems are? How effective, the various community involvement approaches/platforms (Community Monitoring /Social Audits/Village Health and Sanitation Committee (VHSC), Rogi Kalyan Samitis (RKS) etc) have been?
•  How to get available evidence into policy/practice? How to effectively communicate/present scientific knowledge/evidence so that it permeates policy processes? How our policy makers access knowledge/evidence? What constitute effective public health advocacy (media, legal etc.)?

What are we looking for?

• Research papers that address some of the above questions. We are particularly interested in papers that go beyond describing what is happening, and that attempt to explain why, how and for whom the change is occurring. Preference will be given to abstracts that address the above and provide with solutions to these issues.
• Presentations by policy makers looking at the evidence and proposing pragmatic solutions

Conference Secretariat
For any further clarifications; please write to ephpsupport@iphindia.org
Institute of Public Health, 250, 2nd C Main,Girinagar 1st Phase, Bangalore, India. 560085.
Tel: +91 80 26421929
www.iphindia.org