Government responses to the global pandemic have varied both in terms of what was done and the intensity of implementation. This has led to a variety of health and social outcomes where some jurisdictions were more successful in containing the disease, while others were not – despite implementing the same interventions. Much attention is being devoted to assessing different types of interventions and their impact on health outcomes, contributing to a growing body of evidence on these elements of the response. In contrast, the institutional, organizational, governance and political (IOGP) factors, which are significant determinants of what is done and how it is done, have received insufficient attention. We have conducted a scoping review (an adjacent project) to explore which social, political, economic and governance macro factors appear to have the most influence in the selection, implementation and effects of the public health approach to COVID-19. The output is a “map of key contextual factors” with the operational definitions and indicators that have influenced the pandemic response, to be tested locally with senior decision-makers in British Columbia (BC). Our virtual roundtable will further test this map of contextual factors with an interdisciplinary network of international policy makers and researchers.
Peter Berman
Wall Associate
Prof. Peter Berman (M.Sc, Ph.D) is a health economist with forty years of experience in research, policy analysis and development, and training and education in global health. Prof. Berman is Professor and Director, School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia in Vancouver Canada, and Adjunct Professor in Global Health at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, as of January 1, 2019.
He relocated to Vancouver, Canada after a quarter century on the faculty of Harvard University, most recently as Professor of the Practice of Global Health Systems and Economics at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) in Boston, USA. He is also affiliated as Adjunct Professor at the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) in New Delhi, India and as advisor to the China National Health Development Research Center for health care financing and health accounts.
Prof. Berman was the founding faculty director of Harvard Chan’s new Doctor of Public Health degree and was actively engaged in graduate education reform in global public health at Harvard. In recent years, Prof. Berman has led several innovative research projects on developing primary care systems, strengthening service delivery, and improving health care financing mechanisms for better outcomes, with a focus on work in Ethiopia, India, and Malaysia.
