Recovery, Renewal, Resilience

Throughout the pandemic, many health systems across the world have come within days of being overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, and others have been unable to prevent their systems from being overwhelmed. Pakistan have adopted “health stewardship” as an approach to ensure public health is a “joint function of national and provincial governments, where service delivery relies on mixed health systems”. The response in Singh district, which has the highest rate of COVID-19 cases in Pakistan, was underpinned by public-private partnerships with local government. This provides insights into how public-private engagement can be accelerated during the crisis and how “existing policy windows can be used for longer-term planning for pandemics and Universal Health Coverage”. Consider that:

• Stewarding partnerships enabled rapid acceleration of testing through private laboratories, supported surge capacity to be met in local private hospitals and increased “critical care training of public sector hospitals” through partnerships with private hospitals
• “Health stewardship” can enable advisory relationships with the private sector to create a joint operational response and strategic communications during crisis
• Procurement (e.g. of PPE) and supply chain management can be enhanced through “digitalised data-sharing of cases and hospital capacity across private and public providers”
• Stewardship relationships may be transactional (e.g. limited to purchasing arrangements) but can also include “wide-ranging formal agreements for co-production”, providing an opportunity to reform public and private health partnerships
• Devolved operations have proven to offer a flexible and effective response where there is rapid “data sharing for national-provincial coordination, and well-informed local governments who can mobilize inclusive and co-produced responses”

There is research being done on most conceivable topics related to COVID-19. Many projects are looking to expand the range of governments, cities, organisations and individuals that will get involved in the project to contribute information into the project and provide a testbed for their work. Participation may enable you to influence the project towards your priorities, get early access to project findings that could change the ways you deliver, get funding to support your involvement, and provide access to a wider network that can help you in your job. Consider whether to:

• Identify what knowledge gaps you have in your organisation that research could usefully help to fill
• Identify the information that you can feed into projects and other contributions you can make to a project
• Approach local universities and research institutes to partner on research or mutual interest
• Talk to national bodies on what research they have funded
• Contact national and overseas researchers to request participation and/or early notice of their emerging findings
• Joining research webinars, research network email-lists, and research observatories to receive notification of project results
• Join advisory boards of projects to direct their focus
• Search databases of funded projects to find those that align with your interests