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The abiding, hidden, and pervasive centrality of the health research workforce

Edited by:
Paulo Ferrinho, NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal
Michael Makanga, European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership Association, The Netherlands
Shabnum Sarfraz, P2Impact Associates, Pakistan; Women in Global Health, United States of America; Harvard Global Health Institute, United States of America
Mario Dal Poz, University of the Estate of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil


Submission Status: Open   |   Submission Deadline: 30 June 2024


Human Resources for Health is calling for submissions to our Collection on The abiding, hidden, and pervasive centrality of the health research workforce.

Research for health and development (R4HD) acknowledges that many of the determinants of health lie outside the boundaries of the health system.

Understanding the health researchers’ labor market helps to identify means to develop, retain and utilize the health research workforce, addressing size, composition, role, skills transferability, careers, and social impact through building, enabling or sustaining its research functions, capacity, employment opportunities, and career tracks, among other issues. 

This Collection calls for papers that go beyond narrow conceptual approaches and professional understandings of health care workers and the health research workforce, and requests that contributors examine important workforce issues through the broad lens of R4HD within a sustainable development goals framework.

This Collection supports and amplifies research related to the following Sustainable Development Goals: 3 - Good Health and Well-being, and 10 – Reduced Inequalities.

Image credit: © Mikhaylovskiy / stock.adobe.com

Meet the Editors

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Paulo Ferrinho: NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal

Prof. Paulo Ferrinho is Full Professor of Global Public Health at NOVA University Lisbon, Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (IHMT-UNL) and Center for Global Health and Tropical Medicine Research, and its former Director. He is currently Director of the Department of Global Public Health. His areas of interest include public health, One Health, epidemiology, human resources for health and capacity building of academic and research institutions in the Global South. He is a member of the extended Board of the International Federation of Tropical Medicina and the Scientific Advisory Committees of EDCTP2 and the Global Health EDCTP3 Joint Undertaking. He has been involved in collaborative international work in Europe, Africa, South America, and Asia.

Michael Makanga: European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership Assocation, The Netherlands

Dr. Michael Makanga is a clinician-scientist with 27 years of health and clinical research work experience in African and European institutions. He is Executive Director of the European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership Association. Dr. Makanga has significant experience in global health, research for health capacity development, engagement with policy makers, ethics and regulatory authorities in Africa and Europe. Moreover, he has served in various scientific and policy advisory boards for international product development, philanthropic organisations, World Bank and pharmaceutical companies involved in developing medicinal products for poverty related and neglected tropical diseases.

Shabnum Sarfraz: P2Impact Associates, Pakistan


Dr. Shabnum Sarfraz is currently working as Global Director Gender and Health for the Women in Global Health (WGH), an organization with 47 chapters operating across 43 countries and committed to promoting gender equity amongst the Human Resource for Health (HRH) and increase the percentage of women in health leadership. She worked for the Federal Planning Commission, Government of Pakistan, where she was the senior techncial and policy lead for the national health, education, and gender portfolios. She has served as the Senior Technical Advisor at Marie Stopes International UK and Regional HRH Advisor at WHO EMRO, GHWA and was member of the WHO Gender Equity Hub. Her area of interest is in health policy and systems research with particular focus on gender transformative leadership and gender equity in HRH.

Mario Dal Poz: University of the Estate of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil


Dr. Mario Roberto Dal Poz is a full professor and former vice-director of the Institute of Social Medicine at University of the Estate of Rio de Janeiro. He served as a health planning advisor in the cities of Niterói (1977-1980) and Rio de Janeiro (1980-1984), as well as the National Cancer Institute (1984-1985) and the ex-INAMPS-RJ (1985-1986). He worked as the World Health Organization's (WHO) coordinator of human resources for health in Geneva from 2000 to 2012. He is currently the emeritus Editor-in-Chief of the journal Human Resources for Health, fellow of CNPq, Prociência UERJ, and FAPERJ (Scientist of the State).

He is a pediatrician with a passion for public health who has worked in the field of health systems for over 40 years, gaining extensive experience in human resource development at the regional, national, and international levels. Master of Social Medicine with a dissertation on health-care delivery models in the context of Brazil's growing urbanization, and PhD in Public Health with a thesis on the development of a new method of analyzing human resources for health policies.

In addition to Brazil, he has worked in several Latin American, African, Middle Eastern, European, and Asian countries, primarily in the development of technical cooperation in human resources for health (HRH), with a focus on policy, planning, and information systems for health professionals, as well as health system reform. His interests include health service delivery, HRH policy planning and implementation, methodologies for health workforce planning and scaling-up, among others.

With the support of FAPERJ and CNPq, he has been coordinating a research team on the global health workforce crisis, determinants, and perspectives for health personnel education since 2013.

He has over 100 articles published in specialized journals, 30 book chapters, and has organized or edited over 20 books.





 

About the Collection

Human Resources for Health calls for papers on The abiding, hidden, and pervasive centrality of the health research workforce.

Research for health and development (R4HD) acknowledges that many of the determinants of health lie outside the boundaries of the health system. The size and quality of the health and care workforce (HCWF) are key drivers towards the future trajectory of many of these factors. We consider researchers for health and development an abiding, pervasive but neglected constituent part of this HCWF. This workforce straddles many professional groups and sectors.

The diversity of occupations, lack of standardization in occupational cadres, the complexity and gendered aspects of the labor market, and the variable demographic, epidemiological, socio-economic, and health systems’ contexts in the global south and the global north, led to a kaleidoscopic perception of the health research workforce that have kept it hidden from public opinion. This led to neglect by science as well as health policymakers and created an orphan sub-set of the HCWF.

Understanding the health researchers’ labor market will help to identify means to develop, retain and utilize the health research workforce, addressing size, composition, role, skills transferability, careers, and social impact through building, enabling or sustaining its research functions, capacity, employment opportunities, and career tracks, among other issues.

This Collection of the Human Resources for Health Journal, calls for papers that go beyond narrow conceptual approaches and professional understandings of health care workers and the health research workforce, and requests that contributors examine important workforce issues through the broad lens of R4HD within a sustainable development goals framework.

The manuscripts should link to equity issues and bring in an international cooperation angle including south-south, north-south, north-north and triangular collaborations and/or other mechanisms to optimize development, retention and sustainability of the health research workforce.

Submission Guidelines

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This Collection welcomes submission of all types of articles. Should you wish to submit a different article type, please read our submission guidelines to confirm that type is accepted by the journal. 

Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission system, Snapp. Please, select the appropriate Collection title “The abiding, hidden, and pervasive centrality of the health research workforce” tab during the submission stage.

Articles will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process and are subject to all the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer-review process. The peer-review of any submissions for which the Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.