Health policy analysis

Program overview:

The health policy analysis group of the Health Systems Science Program seeks to understand and improve how agendas are set, policies are developed, and how these policies can shape - and be shaped by- health systems, societal understanding of health, and its determinants.

The group is transdisciplinary in nature, and integrates expertise across health economics, sociology, political science, public health, international relations, modelling and qualitative research to conduct health policy analysis across the spectrum to conduct policy analysis across a range of approaches such as:

• Outcome oriented approaches: with the intent to identify the 'best' policy solution, through undertaking objective analyses of possible solutions by mapping or quantitatively assessing effectiveness, equity, or feasibility of implementing policies
• Mainstream approaches: to identify and analyse actors, interactions between them policy process and or to analyse how power and resources are distributed and contested
• Interpretive approaches: to analyse the framing and representation of problems and how policies reflect the social construction of 'problems'
• Comparative approaches: to map and compare different policies with the intent to understand how it compares to norms or across different contexts. This might be done with or without intent to explain policy outputs and outcomes