Shaping Health Systems

Health systems across the world face a range of challenges in adapting to changing social, ecological and technological environments. There are a number of big questions facing individuals, communities and health systems, some of which are catalysed by the economic context in which the world finds itself, including:

• How can we best make ethical organisational decisions in the face of challenging resource constraints?
• What can we do to improve the ability of health services to work effectively with different communities?
• How can we increase the pace and more effectively scale up the social innovation that we see occurring in health systems?
• How can we generate effective and sustainable collective leadership for systems change?
• What does good system working look like? How can we demonstrate (evidence) the social value of good systems working?
• How can self-organising collective action be generated in response to increasingly individualised social policy agendas?

The Shaping Health Systems research and development network is a precise social technology for harnessing the collective wisdom and energy of people working to generate the most effective health systems around the world. From the network will come radical improvement in local health services and lasting, humane, needs-based social change that feels legitimate to people using those services.

The network is a ‘think and do tank’ where learning and research is gained from direct application in real work and continual feedback processes. The network links together health leaders, academics, social entrepreneurs, community activists and organizational development experts to act as collective leaders for change in a number of places across the network.

Our ambition is to enable learning and new ideas to spread across organisations, to develop the leaders of the future; to support real social change in places across the globe and to provide evidence for politicians and policy makers locally and globally. Our focus is evidence-based change and our expertise is in behavioural and social change.