Our vision is for our research to make a real difference to scaling up health services ‘fit for purpose’ to deliver quality continuing care despite limited resources - to the benefit of human health and development.
KGHI will lead the development and evaluation of innovative continuing care models taken to scale, informing policy, planning, health system design, and service delivery.
Our approach is trans-diagnostic, seeking translatable and generalizable health system strengthening innovations towards a framework for continuing care, promoting engagement on defined care pathways, tracking of adherence and outcomes, and ‘treatment to target’.
We embrace the challenges of task-shifted and task-shared models of care, a key strategy for achieving Universal Health Coverage, including the effective training, support and mentoring of non-specialists by specialist services.
We aim to play a significant role in training the next generation of global health researchers, with the knowledge, skills and experience relevant to meeting the challenges of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The challenge to improving healthcare
Healthcare in low and middle income countries reaches far too few of those in need (treatment gap), and does not achieve the best possible results (outcome gap). Resources are limited, so non-specialists provide most treatments. In South Africa nurses lead 90% of primary healthcare consults, in Sierra Leone non-specialists perform 52% of surgical procedures, and Zimbabwe and Ethiopia have fewer than 1 psychiatrist per million. In this context, improving healthcare is challenging, but essential for progress.
KGHI is a truly King’s-wide Institute harnessing our strengths in health service and system research, implementation and quality improvement science, critical social science and ethnography, geography and demography, health and development economics, policy research and knowledge translation.
We strive to add meaning to the concept of interdisciplinary research, valuing all contributions equally. We believe that interdisciplinarity needs radical new ways of working – driving innovation by crossing boundaries, and thinking across them.
Our structures and strategy promote and encourage effective links and collaborations between researchers and educators in our Health and Arts and Sciences Schools, working together on our priority agenda.
Global Health, more than almost any other discipline, depends upon partnership. KGHI works in over 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia. We benefit from a rich network of relationships, built up over the last 15 years.
We work with universities in high, middle and low income countries, Ministries of Health, World Health Organization and other intergovernmental agencies, international and national non-governmental organisations, patient and family organisations. Many of these relationships are long-term, spanning multiple programmes and activities.
We value these well-established, and highly productive associations with southern partners whose research capacity is already strong, and where collaborations can be broadened and deepened. KGHI also commits to long-term and strategic research capacity building with partners that have, as yet, relatively weak health system and research infrastructure.
KGHI aims to establish new standards in equitable partnership for mutual benefit, co-development of research agendas, educational collaboration, and commitment to capacity building and research infrastructure development.
We facilitate south-south partnerships among our partners, and believe that our own increasingly resource-constrained high income country healthcare systems can learn from innovations developed and introduced in the global south.