Happy New Year to all of our readers, authors, reviewers, editorial board members and health policy and planning community!
In 2016 we achieved some exciting developments at Health Policy and Planning and so in this blog, we take a look back at the previous year with our top 10 highlights.
- Introduction of podcasts: https://soundcloud.com/user-347591104
Podcasts were introduced to Health Policy and Planning in September of 2016 as a completely new feature and dissemination channel for the journal. Since then we have published a total of 7 podcasts and have received a total of 327 plays. The most highly accessed podcast is on the incredulously interesting and engaging topic of intersectionality with an emphasis on low- and middle-income countries.
- Vancouver HSG conference attendance and events
We were very busy at the recent Global Symposium on Health Systems Research, where we had a booth presence, both of our editors-in-chief were in attendance along with many of our editorial board members. Read this blog for more information on all of our activities at the conference and beyond but to name a few we:
– hosted an event in recognition of our reviewers
– hosted a breakfast meeting with our section editors
– our editor-in-chief Virginia Wiseman took part in a ‘Meet with editors’ session
- Vancouver pre-collection and HSG supplement
We put together and published an essential pre-read conference article collection relating to (and divided by) the individual sub-themes of this year’s conference: http://bit.ly/2faMxVJ
Health Systems Global, in partnership with Health Policy and Planning and with financial support from International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Canada, also announced a call for papers on the theme of the conference ‘Resilient and responsive health systems for a changing world’. Accepted papers will be published as a special journal supplement during 2017 and papers that receive positive reviews but are not deemed suitable for this supplement may also be considered for individual publication. We are proud to be working with AuthorAid to target more papers led by low-income country teams.
- Junior editor’s programme
We introduced a new programme which engages early career professionals with gaining hands on editorial experience with the processing and decision-making of papers in the field. The two new recruits are Beverly Essue from the University of Sydney and Yusra Shawar from American University and are currently being trained by our senior editors Jeremy Shifman and Virginia Wiseman.
- Recruitment of more section editors
We recruited new Section Editors Bruno Marchal (Health Systems Research), Mylene Lagarde (Health Economics) and James Hargreaves (Implementation research and evaluation). We also recruited Yu He and Jin Xu who will help us to develop a strategy to in order to engage more with our continually expanding Chinese readership.
- Regular blog content – accesses and top blogs
We now publish an average of 2 blogs a month on HPP Debated and we received close to 10,000 page views last year. The ‘Brexit means Brexit’ blog from Martin McKee was a highlight and stimulated much discussion and interest in the journal.
As well as our ‘Alcohol policy, tobacco exceptionalism and the need for policy learning’ and ‘Can communities become too engaged in global health initiatives? And how to measure their existence?’.
7. New website launch
After some time in the planning- we have finally launched with a brand new website for Health Policy and Planning which is more modern in nature and more flexible in terms of content. Please do check this out if you haven’t already: https://academic.oup.com/heapol.
- Celebration of world days
We made a splash for World Mental Health Day 2016: Poor can gain more healthy life years as compared to the rich by the Ethiopian mental health strategyhttp://blogs.lshtm.ac.uk/hppdebated/2016/10/10/poor-can-gain-more-healthy-life-years-as-compared-to-the-rich-by-the-ethiopian-mental-health-strategy/
World AIDS Day 2016: The US election results and the fragility of global HIV control initiatives
http://blogs.lshtm.ac.uk/hppdebated/2016/12/01/the-us-election-results-and-the-fragility-of-global-hiv-control-initiatives/
World AIDS Day 2016: reasons to hope? http://blogs.lshtm.ac.uk/hppdebated/2016/12/01/world-aids-day-2016-reasons-to-hope/
- Twitter account: https://twitter.com/HPP_LSHTM
We know have 2,890 followers on Twitter, an increase of 624 followers since June 2016. This averages out to 25 new followers a week! Follow us here: https://twitter.com/HPP_LSHTM.
- Supplements
We are very proud of the supplements we published in 2016:
- District decision making for health in low income settings
Podcast including Kara Hanson: http://bit.ly/2crmMxX
Blog: http://bit.ly/2doFJVj - The Emergence and Effectiveness of Global Health Networks
Blog: http://bit.ly/28NOGBX
Things to look out for this year:
- Review collections on topics including finance and resource allocation, infectious disease, reproductive health and intervention delivery
- Podcasts in different languages
- Promotion of content on world days
- Publishing of more high quality supplements
Finally, we would like to thank our Executive Board and Editorial Advisers for their guidance and support during 2016. Look out, 2017!
