Health Systems Research Unit

Acting Director: Dr Cathy Mathews
E-mail: catherine.mathews@mrc.ac.za

Word from Acting Director
Mickey Chopra, has resigned as Director of the Unit to take up a post at Unicef, New York. He will, however, remain involved with research within the Unit. Cathy Mathews has taken over as Acting Director during the process of appointing a new director.

Mandate of the Unit
The Health Systems Research Unit has re-established itself as a leading research unit focusing on understanding the underlying problems that contribute to ineffectiveness during the delivery of healthcare. The Unit does not have specific research projects dependent on MRC core funding, but instead, use these resources for central administrative and office costs and as ‘seed funding’ for new initiatives.

Outline of ongoing research and major focus
The Health Systems Research Unit has decided to focus, in the short term, some of the key challenges related to the provision of comprehensive primary health care services and particularly, the challenges of scaling up HIV services. Key themes in this work include: increasing access to high quality comprehensive HIV care; the absorption capacity of existing health delivery systems; human resource impacts; cost-efficiency; possible adverse long-term effects on the HIV epidemic, such as how possible changes in sexual behaviour will relate to prevention and transmission patterns and monitoring the impact of longer term prevention interventions.  This entails analysing the impact of large-scale ART on an individual level as well as from a public health perspective, considering effects on prevention and sexual behaviour, while also looking at the demands and absorption capacity of the health system as a whole.

The Unit has already acted to move this research agenda forward. Discussions with both the National and Provincial Departments of Health have resulted in full support and in some cases, funding for projects. We have also secured a significant amount of external funding.