Waldman L, Ahmed T, Scott N, Akter S, Standing H and Rasheed S (2018) ‘We have the internet in our hands’: Bangladeshi college students’ use of ICTs for health information, Globalization and Health, 14:31, DOI: 10.1186/s12992-018-0349-6
Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) which enable people to access, use and promote health information through digital technology, promise important health systems innovations which can challenge gatekeepers’ control of information, through processes of disintermediation. College students, in pursuit of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) information, are particularly affected by gatekeeping as strong social and cultural norms restrict their access to information and services. This paper examines mobile phone usage for obtaining health information in Mirzapur, Bangladesh. It contrasts college students’ usage with that of the general population, asks whether students are using digital technologies for health information in innovative ways, and examines how gender affects this.
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Bloom G, Berdou E, Standing H, Guo Z and Labrique A (2017) ICTs and the challenge of health system transition in low and middle-income countries, Globalization and Health, 13:56, doi: 10.1186/s12992-017-0276-y
The aim of this paper is to contribute to debates about how governments and other stakeholders can influence the application of ICTs to increase access to safe, effective and affordable treatment of common illnesses, especially by the poor. First, it argues that the health sector is best conceptualized as a ‘knowledge economy’. This supports a broadened view of health service provision that includes formal and informal arrangements for the provision of medical advice and drugs. This is particularly important in countries with a pluralistic health system, with relatively underdeveloped institutional arrangements. It then argues that reframing the health sector as a knowledge economy allows us to circumvent the blind spots associated with donor-driven ICT-interventions and consider more broadly the forces that are driving e-health innovations. It draws on small case studies in Bangladesh and China to illustrate new types of organization and new kinds of relationship between organizations that are emerging. It argues that several factors have impeded the rapid diffusion of ICT innovations at scale including: the limited capacity of innovations to meet health service needs, the time it takes to build new kinds of partnership between public and private actors and participants in the health and communications sectors and the lack of a supportive regulatory environment. It emphasises the need to understand the political economy of the digital health knowledge economy and the new regulatory challenges likely to emerge. It concludes that governments will need to play a more active role to facilitate the diffusion of beneficial ICT innovations at scale and ensure that the overall pattern of health system development meets the needs of the population, including the poor.
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Many low and middle-income countries have pluralistic health systems with a variety of providers of health-related goods and services in terms of their level of training, their ownership (public or private) and their relationship with the regulatory system. The development of institutional arrangements to influence their performance has lagged behind the spread of these markets. This paper presents a framework for analysing a pluralistic health system.
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How do we explain the paradox that Bangladesh has made remarkable progress in health and human development, yet its achievements have taken place within a health system that is frequently characterised as weak, in terms of inadequate physical and human infrastructure and logistics, and low performing? We argue that the development of a highly pluralistic health system environment, defined by the participation of a multiplicity of different stakeholders and agents and by ad hoc, diffused forms of management has contributed to these outcomes by creating conditions for rapid change.
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This article describes and analyses a research based engagement by a university school of public health in Bangladesh aimed at raising public debate on sexuality and rights and making issues such as discrimination more visible to policy makers and other key stakeholders in a challenging context.
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The commentary describes the increasing interest from research and communication practitioners, policy makers and funders in expanding the impact of research on policy and practice. It notes the need for contextually embedded understanding of ways to engage multiple stakeholders in the politicized, sensitive and often contested arenas of sexual and reproductive health.
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There has been a dramatic spread of market relationships in many low- and middle-income countries. This spread has been much faster than the development of the institutional arrangements to influence the performance of health service providers. This paper applies lessons from this experience to the issue of informal providers, drawing on the findings of studies in Bangladesh and Nigeria.
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Much analysis of health care markets draws heavily on the experiences of the advanced market economies where there is a much clearer demarcation of the roles of, and boundaries between, the public and private sectors in delivering services. This has led to a tendency to seek models for ―working with the private sector‖ from these countries, without taking sufficient account of their strong institutional and regulatory arrangements for both market and non-market services (Bloom and Standing 2008). This paper argues for a different approach to policy formulation that bases the assessment of the likely outcome of different reform options on a closer understanding of the realities of the markets that have emerged in developing and transitional economies.
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This paper is concerned with how poor populations can obtain access to trusted, competent knowledge and services in increasingly pluralistic health systems where unregulated markets for health knowledge and services dominate.
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This paper explores the implications of the increasing role of informal as well as formal markets in the health systems of many low and middle-income countries. It focuses on institutional arrangements for making the benefits of expert medical knowledge widely available in the face of the information asymmetries that characterise health care.
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The purpose of this Special Issue is to stimulate innovative thinking about health system development in low-income and transition countries. In this introduction, we set out why future health systems will probably look very different and why it is particularly important to explore the possibilities now.
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