What role can health policy and systems research play in supporting responses to COVID-19 that strengthen socially just health systems?

COVID-19 ruthlessly exposes the fault lines of health services and systems, and the responses put in place to prevent its spread or mitigate its effects may affect people more than the actual infection. In the light of this, we outline how health policy and systems research (HPSR) can both address current short-term challenges, and support the system transformations needed to strengthen people-centred and equitable health systems over the long term. The HPSR community has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic quickly, following the wave of publications on epidemiological and clinical aspects of the disease. Inevitably, however, due to the acute nature of the crisis, few papers have yet focused on how health systems are coping with or adapting to the pandemic, or how health policy-making and decision-making has (or has not) changed in this time of crisis. Yet, there is an urgent need to develop a structured research agenda to inform health policy and system responses to COVID-19 that can move us beyond the current crisis, and into the future. This commentary makes proposals towards such an agenda.

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Lucy Gilson, Bruno Marchal, Irene Ayepong, Edwine Barasa, Jean-Paul Dossou, Asha George, Ryan Guinaran, Daniel Maceira, Sassy Molyneux, N S Prashanth, Helen Schneider, Yusra Shawar, Jeremy R Shiffman, Kabir Sheikh, Neil Spicer, Sara Van Belle, Eleanor Whyle, What role can health policy and systems research play in supporting responses to COVID-19 that strengthen socially just health systems?, Health Policy and Planning, czaa112, https://doi.org/10.1093/heapol/czaa112