Flagship Course

Overview

The health care systems in the Asia-Pacific region are heterogeneous. The countries span a wide spectrum of socioeconomic development, from less developed countries, to middle income countries, and higher income countries. Therefore the information and training needs of countries differ.

The Flagship Cluster aims to build and strengthen the capacity of policy-makers and researchers in the Asia-Pacific region/countries through the use of the Global Flagship Framework and Approach to analyze health system performance, and design health care reforms to achieve health system goals. Information draws on innovative health care reforms in the Asia-Pacific region, especially focusing on less-researched aspects of health systems such as organization and regulation, to inform policy makers and researchers.

Core Functions and Objectives

By the end of the course, participants are expected to:

Explain the different aspects of UHC and the ways UHC relates to the performance goals of a health system.
Systematically analyze the challenges, opportunities, and potential risks associated with using the five main policy levers (financing, payment, regulation, organization and persuasion) to move health systems towards UHC.
Recognize the ethical and political economy issues involved in progressing towards UHC.
Appreciate the importance of promoting health, preventing disease, and controlling costs to making progress towards UHC.
Gain a clearer sense of the options, opportunities, constraints and priorities in considering the next steps towards UHC in their countries.

Asst. Prof. Chantal Herberholz

Asst. Prof. Chantal Herberholz, PhD Faculty of Economics Chulalongkorn UniversityBangkok, Thailand Chantal is an Executive Committee Member of the faculty’s Center for Health Economics. Dr. Herberholz’ research interests include trade in services (education, health and financial services), health care financing and household decision making. She teaches courses in economic development, investment and health care financing. She participated in the annual training courses of the Asia Network for Capacity Building in Health Systems Strengthening (ANHSS) Public Private Partnership Cluster and contributed to these courses as resource person.

Prof. Eng Kiong Yeoh

Professor of Public Health Director, The Jockey Club School of Public Health and Primary Care Head, Division of Health System, Policy and Management, The Jockey Club School of Public Health and Primary Care

Prof. Laksono Trisnantoro

Department of Health Policy and Management Faculty of Medicine

Universitas Gadjah Mada Indonesia

Professor Laksono is a Professor in Health Policy and Administration and a senior researcher at Faculty of Medicine Universitas Gadjah Mada Indonesia. His Ph.D is from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In 2001 he spent his PostDoc year at Harvard Medical School, Department of Social Medicine, Boston. He is currently the Director of Graduate Program in Hospital Management Universitas Gadjah Mada and Chief Editor of Indonesian Journal of Health Policy.

His main interest is in health policy and administration, especially health service decentralization. He serves as consultant for Minister of Health and local government for many years. During the last 8 years, he is the director of various programs for supporting health services in remote areas as a collaboration between Universitas Gadjah Mada, local governments, and Ministry of Health. During Aceh and North Sumatera recovery after tsunami in 2004, Prof Laksono Trisnantoro directed a strong team for supporting health service for 4 years. Since 2010 he manages a consortium of hospitals and medical schools for supporting remote hospitals in Nusa Tenggara Timur province focusing in Maternal and Child health service. He spends part of his time as short-term consultant and technical adviser to a number of international agencies such as World Health Organization, AusAid, and the World Bank.

Malabika Sanker

Malabika Sanker (PhD) is a Professor & Director Research of James P Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University, Bangladesh. Dr. Sarker is a physician with a Master’s in Public Health (MPH) from Harvard University, USA and a Doctorate in Public Health from University of Heidelberg, Germany. She has been a Population Council Fellow and Fogarty Fellow at the University of Alabama, USA. Dr. Sarker worked as a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Public Health (IPH), University of Heidelberg, Germany. She has conducted research on prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV, and quality of maternal care in several Sub Saharan African countries. Last five years she has focused mainly on evaluation, implementation research in the areas of MnCH, Tuberculosis, communication for development and health care financing. She has published 35 articles in several international peer-reviewed journals, authored two book chapters, and specializes in mixed-methods research.

Maria Elena B. Herrera

Asian Institute of Management

Manila, Philippines

Maya is an actuary, a management consultant, a teacher and a writer. She is core faculty of the Asian Institute of Management, Philippines. She is also Program Director of the Asian Institute of Management’s Strategic Finance, Finance for Senior Executives and Enterprise-Wide Risk Management Programs. Her fields of current study and research include: corporate strategy, enterprise risk management, corporate social responsibility, governance in family corporations, health policy and finance, entrepreneurship and innovation. Prof. Herrera has been in the training and consulting field since 1989. She provides technical advice as well as facilitation, training and executive coaching services. Her primary geographical areas of research, training and consulting are South East Asia, India and China.

Dr. Narjis Rizvi

Assistant Professor Department of Community

Health Sciences Aga Khan University

Karachi, Pakistan

Narjis is a public health researcher with over 25 years of experience of working in different parts of Pakistan. She is a physician by training and is a Fellow of the College of Physician and Surgeons, Pakistan. She specializes in the design, planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of community-based health systems projects.

As a faculty member in the department of Community Health Sciences (CHS), Aga Khan University, Pakistan, she is the focal person for undergraduate curriculum designing and implementation. She also teaches in the two masters programs of the CHS department namely Health Policy and Management and Epidemiology and Biostatistics. She has also worked at Health Services Academy (HSA), a federal public health institution of the Ministry of Health, Islamabad, Pakistan. While working at HSA, she taught graduate and post graduate public health students. She has provided technical oversight to a number of research studies that assessed and evaluated; Lady Health Worker’s performance, training curriculum of Community Midwives, maternal and child health programmes, youth awareness raising campaigns and Polio eradication.

Her literary work has been published in many international and national journals namely; Health Policy, Sexually Transmitted Infections, Injury Prevention, Biomed Central and many others. Her current research portfolio include; Co-Investigator, “Measles Immunization Coverage Survey in Sindh” funded by WHO; Co-Investigator, “Sukh”, a family planning project implemented in ten communities of Karachi funded by Aman, Bill Gates.

Nopphol Witvorapong

Faculty of Economics

Chulalongkorn UniversityBangkok, Thailand
Nopphol is an executive member of the Center for Health Economics (a WHO collaborating center for Health Economics) and the acting director of the Center for Alcohol Studies under the Thai Health Promotion Foundation. His current research interests include health insurance, intra-household relationships, health of the elderly, behavioral change and alcohol control policies. He has degrees in economics from the University of Oxford (UK), the University of Bath (UK) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA). Nopphol was a faculty member for the Asia Pacific Regional Flagship course in 2015 and 2016.

Ravi Rannan-Eliya

Director Institute of Health Policy Sri Lanka

Ravi is a Fellow and Executive Director of the Institute for Health Policy. He is a physician and economist with degrees in Political Science and Medicine from the University of Cambridge and doctoral training in Health Economics from Harvard University. In 1996, he established and developed the leading health economics research group in Sri Lanka, at the Institute of Policy Studies, before transforming it in 2005 into a full-fledged, independent research center, the Institute for Health Policy (IHP), which he now leads. He has undertaken research and consulted in more than 30 countries, working with the World Bank, WHO, ADB, and other agencies and governments.

He is recognized as a leading international expert in the areas of health equity research and health accounting. His current research focuses on issues of health systems financing, aging, equity, non-communicable disease and child under-nutrition. He is director of the IHP Research Hub of the Asia Pacific Observatory on Health Systems and Policy, co-director of the Global Network on Health Equity (GNHE), which brings together a number of regional health equity networks, and he coordinates two major scientific networks – APNHAN (Asia-Pacific National Health Accounts Network), and Equitap (Equity in Asia-Pacific Health Systems).

Prof. Siripen Supakankunti

Associate Professor Faculty of Economics

Chulalongkorn University Bangkok, Thailand