LHSS Chief of Party in Peru, Paulina Giusti learns what three organizations in Peru and Colombia are doing to improve access and link people with mental health needs to the services they require through psychosocial support networks.

With increased migration around the world posing unique challenges and opportunities for health systems, efforts to better integrate and include migrants and host communities in national health systems are an integral part of the global health equity agenda. 

This brief describes opportunities to improve financial protection programs using behavior change approaches. The Practice Spotlights Social and Behavior Change series supports USAID’s Vision for Health System Strengthening 2030 by exploring how social and behavior change approaches can contribute to countries’ health system strengthening efforts.

This brief introduces the social determinants of health (SDOH) concept and terminology, and discusses approaches to addressing SDOH. Understanding these root causes of health inequities and their impact on health care access, quality, and equity is crucial to strengthening health systems.

The 8th Global Symposium on Health Systems Research (HSR 2024) will be held in Nagasaki, Japan, from November 18 to 22, 2024.

This two-pager focuses on USAID’s Learning Question 6, "What are key behavioral outcomes that indicate a functioning, integrated health system? In what ways can integrated health system strengthening approaches explicitly include social and behavior change?"

This two-pager focuses on USAID’s Learning Question 4, “What are effective and sustainable mechanisms or processes to integrate local, community, sub-national, national, and regional voices, priorities, and contributions into USAID’s health system strengthening efforts?”

This toolkit provides Colombia’s territorial entities with the tools they need to tackle stigma and unconscious bias within the health sector in order to strengthen their capacity to provide equitable health care services to all members of the population, particularly in high migration settings.

Using performance-based financing, this pilot project represents a significant achievement for the Colombian healthcare system, improving the optimization of financial resources, enhancing key indicators, and notably impacting outcomes, especially for migrant pregnant women—an area receiving special attention from local and national health authorities.

LHSS along with speakers from USAID and WHO reflected on strategies to ensure reliable funding for costing the planning, design, implementation, and evaluation of a National Quality Policy and Strategy (NQPS).

In this video, discover how local organizations in Cali work to strengthen capacity, promote sustainability, and improve access to health information related to the country’s health system.

To strengthen capacities and promote equitable access to the Colombian health care system, LHSS and the Healthy Communities program forged several high-impact partnerships in Bogotá. These partnerships focused on supporting the integration process of the migrant population, host communities, and returning Colombians into the country’s health system. This video highlights beneficiaries and partners impacted by this effort.

This brief highlights the recent shifts in health systems practice toward more explicitly incorporating an SBC lens in social accountability activities that aim to improve overall health system performance and address inequities. The brief synthesizes the growing body of evidence on the role social accountability plays in increasing accessibility to better-quality health care services and uses case studies and lessons learned to highlight how SBC approaches can be more explicitly integrated into this aspect of HSS programming.

This brief builds on the USAID Local Health System Sustainability Project (LHSS) Strengthening Governance report (2022) and global National Quality Policy and Strategy (NQPS) survey, aiming to provide practical examples and considerations for country practitioners to consider on their quality journeys. It includes case studies of three countries that have used NQPS to mobilize and align resources for quality.

This Spanish document contains the impact and lessons learned from the intervention Strengthening Information, Education and Communication (IEC) Capacities carried out by Uniminuto to strengthen IEC processes in the communication offices of municipal, district or departmental health secretariats.