Health Systems Strengthening and the Global Health Agenda: a case of what goes up, must come down?

March 2, 2011 – The McMaster Health Forum Student Subcommittee invites all students, staff, faculty and community members to attend a public talk on health systems strengthening and its place on the global health agenda.

The talk on March 9 from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. will provide those in attendance with the opportunity to learn about the significance of health systems strengthening among global health policymakers and will explore how the issue has gained political priority to a position at the top of the global health agenda. It will be held in the Forum’s DialogueSpace on the fourth floor of Mills Memorial Library.

Sara Bennett, associate professor in the Health Systems Program at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, will deliver the talk. Bennett will trace the evolution and underlying causes of the current global focus on health systems, and will situate this trend within the longer term narrative of global health debates.

Global commitment to health systems strengthening in low- and middle-income countries has reached a pitch not previously seen. Health systems, although not always referred to by this name, have fluctuated from high to low on the global health agenda. Bennett will address what can be done to ensure that an appropriate focus on health systems strengthening is maintained, in the face of multiple issues competing for attention at the global level, and the recent global financial crisis.

Bennett is also an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She has a background in politics and economics and has conducted research across a wide range of health system issues including health financing, human resources for health, changing government roles and the impact of global health initiatives on health systems. Her current interests focus on health systems governance and policy analysis. She is particularly interested in effective approaches to the development of research and government capacity.

She is currently the CEO of a large U.K. Department for International Development-funded research consortium: Future Health Systems. Bennett is a board member of the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research (where she was previously the executive director), a member of the World Health Organization’s Advisory Committee on Health Research, and an editor of Health Policy and Planning.

This event has been organized as part of the Forum’s Global Health Public Talks series under the coordination of Steven Hoffman, an adjunct faculty with the Forum who teaches the Forum’s Global Health Advocacy course, and with the support of McMaster’s Bachelor of Health Sciences program. If interested in attending, please RSVP to  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , with ‘Bennett talk’ in the subject line.

To view a poster for the event, please click here.