Need and Scope of Journal focused on Health System and Implementation Research

Strong health systems are fundamental to improve health outcomes. Knowledge and understanding of what constitutes an effective health system is growing. Still there is no established framework to measure the systems performance and to apply the package of interventions to implement. Many health systems simply lack the capacity to measure or understand their own weaknesses and constraints, which effectively leaves policy-makers without scientifically sound ideas of what they can and should actually strengthen.

There is need to generate evidence for program implementers that can be applied at local level. The problem is compounded by the fact that health systems research or implementation research is not done in classical research mode of randomized control trials. Health systems face problems that may look trivial, but has serious consequences. Often, solutions are local. These local solutions are generally implemented without much scientific rigour. Most often, these are not accepted by the high impact scientific journals. Many other journals publish at very high charges in the name of open access policy. Such local experiences never reach the implementers and other implementation researchers. Resultantly, most of the research of public health scholars, students and researchers with limited funding, remain buried in form of reports and thesis, and never see the light of the day. This is gross wastage of research efforts for any country.

Thus, a need was felt to have a journal, which follows the principles of any good peer reviewed journal, but publishes implementation experiences on priority. These experiences can be as simple as some case studies. Although, it is desirable to have success stories, but failures also teach us equally. Publication in this journal will not depend on sample sizes but will reflect the passion of the researcher. We aim that each article in this journal should stimulate and motivate the reader to act. We also intend to motivate the young researchers to chose topic of implementation research for their thesis work, which we promise will be given due publicity through this journal.

Although, publications on intervention research will be given priority, other articles highly relevant to health systems building block may also be considered. In this issue, three important case studies have been given. It has been increasingly recognized that health system officials don’t use locally generated data for decision making. Pathway to make them use data is unclear. The case study by Shuchi et al gives insight into this. Severe Acute Malnutrition is yet another important issue.

Kirtan et al demonstrated that with persistence and faith, even resistant family can co-operate and one can achieve the results. Country is not able to address the problem of anaemia. Common explanations given are non compliance to iron and folic acid during pregnancy. Case study by Nivedita et al shows that tele follow-up can help the pregnant ladies get appropriate treatment for anaemia and can improve compliance.

Together, we hope to make change in the health systems.