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.

With LHSS support, the Government of the Republic of Kazakhstan hosted an Interagency Technical Working Group Coordination Meeting in Astana. Ministries of Health, Veterinary Services, Agriculture, and Ecology, alongside international organizations, discussed collaborative preparedness, human resource capacity for One Health, and joint disease investigation. 

With support from USAID’s LHSS Project, the Ministry of Health and Social Protection of the Population (MOHSPP) in Tajikistan strengthened Tajikistan’s national laboratory system and supported the country’s COVID-19 Country Preparedness and Response Plan.

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 brief introduces collaborative learning as an effective approach to support sustainable health system strengthening. Collaborative learning brings together local leaders and experts to learn from one another, problem-solve, co-create new knowledge, and adapt and apply their learning.

Two years ago, as it struggled to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus and get people vaccinated, the Government of Jamaica turned to private health care providers for help. The results went well beyond its expectations.

This document explores the issues facing the Timorese health system, identifies the existing mechanisms for engagement between the MoH and CSOs, and offers recommendations to improve the engagement.

The Most Significant Change (MSC) is a complexity-aware monitoring approach that helps us track and understand important changes happening in systems, practices, organizations, and people. LHSS Bangladesh has applied this MSC tool to identify, evaluate, and understand the most substantial changes within our primary health care system functions. 

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).

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.

In this webinar, we discuss conditions that facilitate the institutionalization of practices that improve health system outcomes.