Alonge O, Sonkarlay S, Gwaikolo W, Fahim C, Cooper JL and Peters DH (2019) Understanding the role of community resilience in addressing the Ebola virus disease epidemic in Liberia: a qualitative study (community resilience in Liberia), Global Health Action, 12:1, DOI: 10.1080/16549716.2019.1662682
There is an increasing recognition that community resilience plays a significant role in addressing health shocks like the Ebola virus disease (EVD) epidemic. However, the factors that constitute community resilience, and how these operate dynamically with other health system factors are less understood. This paper seeks to understand key factors that constitute community resilience and their role in responding to the EVD outbreak in Liberia.
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Glandon D, Paina L, Alonge O, Peters DH and Bennett S (2017) 10 Best resources for community engagement in implementation research, Health Policy and Planning, Volume 32, Issue 10, 1457–1465, doi: 10.1093/heapol/czx123
Implementation research (IR) focuses on understanding how and why interventions produce their effects in a given context. This often requires engaging a broad array of stakeholders at multiple levels of the health system. Whereas a variety of tools and approaches exist to facilitate stakeholder engagement at the national or institutional level, there is a substantial gap in the IR literature about how best to do this at the local or community level. Similarly, although there is extensive guidance on community engagement within the context of clinical trials—for HIV/AIDS in particular—the same cannot be said for IR. We identified a total of 59 resources by using a combination of online searches of the peer-reviewed and grey literature, as well as crowd-sourcing through the Health Systems Global platform. The authors then completed two rounds of rating the resources to identify the ‘10 best’.
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Engineer C, Dale E, Agarwal A, Agarwal A, Alonge O, Edward A, Gupta S, Schuh H, Burnham G, Peters DH (2016) Effectiveness of a pay for performance intervention to improve maternal and child health services in Afghanistan: A cluster-randomized trial, International Journal of Epidemiology, doi: 10.1093/ije/dyv362
A cluster randomized trial of a pay-for-performance (P4P) scheme was implemented in Afghanistan to test whether P4P could improve maternal and child (MCH) services. The authors found that the intervention had minimal effect, possibly due to difficulties communicating with health workers and inattention to demand-side factors. P4P interventions need to consider management and community demand issues.
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Alonge O, Peters DH, (2015) Utility and limitations of measures of health inequities: a theoretical perspective, Global Health Action, 8: 27591 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/gha.v8.27591
This paper examines common approaches for quantifying health inequities and assesses the extent to which they incorporate key theories necessary for explicating the definition of health inequity. The first theoretical analysis examined the distinction between inter-individual and inter-group health inequalities as measures of health inequities. The second analysis considered the notion of fairness in health inequalities from different philosophical perspectives.
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Alonge O, Gupta S, Engineer C, Salehi AS, Peters DH, (2015) Assessing the pro-poor effect of different contracting schemes for health services on health facilities in rural Afghanistan, Health Policy & Plannning, 30 (10): 1229-1242, doi: 10.1093/heapol/czu127
Despite progress in improving health outcomes in Afghanistan by contracting public health services through non-governmental organizations (NGOs), inequity in access persists between the poor and non-poor. This study examined the distributive effect of different contracting types on primary health services provision between the poor and non-poor in rural Afghanistan.
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