The Global Health Network is a vast and connected community of practice, enabling teams to generate research evidence in marginalised communities, health challenges and healthcare settings. Operating both online and in-person, it advances equity in where health research happens, who leads and who benefits from the evidence.
This highly active community comprises over 1.4M healthcare workers and researchers, over 20 country hubs, and more than 60 international research organisations and Networks, including CEPI, EDCTP and WHO, as the collaborating centre for Research Information Sharing, E-learning, and Capacity Development. It connects actors locally and globally to grow capacity, enable collaboration, and provide access to the best available and trusted health research knowledge and methods. The Global Health Network enables healthcare workers at all levels to overcome barriers to generating evidence on priority health challenges in any setting. This drives equity in access to knowledge, methods and opportunities, through sharing technology, processes, and skills, to ensure that high-quality methods and support are accessible to any team, anywhere.
The Global Health Network works across all aspects of health research to address the following aims:
- To embed health research in places, diseases and regions where evidence is lacking by bringing support, training and guiding faster, easier and better research processes
- To drive equity in who takes part and who benefits from health research by enabling the open movement of health research information, data and know-how between diseases areas, regions, organisations and communities
- To build lasting capable research teams in low-resource settings who are able to lead research studies and compete internationally for recognition, reward, engagement and visibility
These aims are achieved through a combination of this online platform for knowledge sharing and by connection and building strategic partnerships, online and in person. Much of this is facilitated through a vast digital platform (The Global Health Network - theglobalhealthnetwork.org). Here there are two highly connected elements, firstly, the knowledge hubs which operate as an open online science park. Different consortia, organisations, networks and programmes have their own hubs. These hubs provide highly functional working spaces, where members of each community of practice can access their specific project documents, each other and work efficiently across networks.
The hubs also work to raise engagement, visibility and access to each organisation, network or project’s outputs and activities, because through The Global Health Network they are made discoverable to the research community. Furthermore, as these hubs are all connected within this wider community of practice and because the topics of these hubs cut across disease and research areas, researchers can learn from each other and share best practice and know-how, thereby speeding up progress, removing duplication and bringing efficacy.
The other element of The Global Health Network is teaching, training and career development for research teams, healthcare workers and laboratory staff. Here there are online training courses, teaching resources and vast numbers of toolkits and learning materials. All aiming to support safe, ethical and robust research in places, regions and settings where evidence is lacking by delivering skills, methods and building competencies and careers.
The Global Health Network - Strengthening community-led evidence generation for healthier lives
Governance, Management and Operational Delivery
The Global Health Network is governed, managed and delivered via an Operational Leadership and Delivery team, Scientific Advisory board and Strategic Partners Forum - organised in the following structure:
Find out more about these structures and current membership
Operational Delivery
The day-to-day management The Global Health Network is run by a dedicated, global Operational Leadership and Delivery Team comprised of:
- Four Coordination Centres located in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Africa, Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Asia
- An Operational Management Team supporting across these regional efforts
Governance
Oversight, guidance and independent review of The Global Health Network is achieved through two bodies, the Scientific Advisory Board and Strategic Partners Forum. Both groups ensure that activities focus on the core aims and create impact by fostering more and better health research in low-resource settings.
- The Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) provides strategic oversight of The Global Health Network’s programmes
- A Strategic Partners Forum (SPF) reviews the network's activities, outcomes and plans relative to each organisation’s core aims