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Health Systems Collaborative focuses on improving healthcare delivery for low-income populations in Africa, especially in hospitals in rural areas. The AFRHiCARE project, a collaboration with clinicians, social scientists, and economists in Uganda, Kenya, South Africa and Oxford, examines how hospitals can effectively utilise technologies and innovations. We aim to optimise hospital operations to deliver high-quality care, ensuring essential services for patients in resource-poor settings across Africa.

My name is Professor Mike English, I started life as a paediatrician and now I do health systems research.

The research I do is focused on how do you deliver the best quality healthcare services to people, particularly in Africa, so low-income populations particularly in Africa. I'm focused on the health service delivery, not the sort of particular medical treatment that might be invented.

One of our current research projects that we're getting going on now is called AFRHiCARE. This is a collaborative project with people in Uganda, Kenya and South Africa and us in Oxford. We're interested in what the district hospital or the smaller hospital, often in rural areas, will look like in the future in Africa. Hospitals are obviously a major place for all of us to go when we need care, but very few people are thinking about how those places are organised, how the people in them will work, how they'll use technologies. What we're trying to do is anticipate how we can get the best value out of those hospitals for patients in the long run. Our team is quite broad on this project, we have a mix of people who are from clinical backgrounds like me, we have social scientists, we have economists and we're studying the technologies and the different types of people or the professions that are in the hospitals and how they could work best to provide that form of care.

Why are we doing this? We think it's one of the big questions in this broad field, of how do we actually deliver all these innovations and inventions that clever people are creating, new medicines, new technologies etc., even artificial intelligence. They all have to be used by people who are actually delivering health care, and our work is really focused on how do you make those things work so that they make better care for the patients. We're trying to understand how the people in different places use those technologies, work together as teams and provide the best quality care they can.

We think our work is important for patients because if you imagine a sick child, or a sick baby, or a mother who's having complications of pregnancy, or even somebody who's had a road traffic accident, they will need a hospital near them that can provide the essential care as best as it possibly can, and really that's what we're trying to do. The hospitals in many low-income countries, particularly Africa, are often quite resource poor. They don't have many health workers, they don't often have much equipment, they don't have many new technologies. What we're interested in is how can we elevate them so they can do the best possible job for those kinds of people who need their care.

We like to think our work's important because no matter how many wonderful new medical treatments you invent, or new scanners, or new AI devices, at the end of the day they have to be delivered by people to patients. Our work is about how do you make the best of those inventions or innovations so that we can truly deliver high quality care and save people's lives or give them better lives.

This interview was recorded in July 2024.

Mike English

Mike English, Professor of International Child Health and Leader of the Health Systems Collaborative, NDM Centre for Global Health Research, University of Oxford, tells us about his research on how to deliver the best quality healthcare services to low-income populations, particularly in Africa.

Translational Medicine

From bench to bedside

Ultimately, medical research must translate into improved treatments for patients. Our researchers collaborate to develop better health care, improved quality of life, and enhanced preventative measures for all patients. Our findings in the laboratory are translated into changes in clinical practice, from bench to bedside.