Professor Viola Burau

Viola Burau is Professor of Health Policy and Health Organisation. In health policy, she has advanced understanding of the opportunities and limitations of health reform based on cross-country comparative research. Her contributions include numerous international publications; among them a widely cited co-authored textbook published in five editions. Within health organisation research, she has contributed to the development of actor-centred approaches for analysing how professional groups shape change in health services. Her work is particularly distinguished by the application of these approaches to integrated care initiatives across diverse service settings, as reflected in an extensive publication record in leading health services journals. Her current research projects focus on intersectoral collaboration in community-based mental health services and shared global learning about primary healthcare workforce policies.

The health, economic and societal benefits of well-functioning primary health care are well-documented. However, across the globe health care systems struggle to ensure equitable access to primary health care. A persistent challenge is the shortage of a sufficiently large, qualified and adequately distributed healthcare workforce. This challenge affects countries in both the Global South and the Global North and calls for novel approaches to strengthening primary health care reach.

Shared learning across the Global South and North represents a potentially powerful but underutilized approach. Comparative research is often conducted within, rather than across, global regions. An important exception is primary health system strengthening in the Global South, which has frequently drawn on knowledge transfer from the Global North.

This talk aims to break new ground by adopting a two-way perspective. It reports the findings of collaborative research project which compares primary healthcare workforce policies across the Global South and North, with a specific focus on the stakeholder narratives and policy capacities underpinning these policies. We examine Denmark and Malawi, two countries that have enacted policies to address primary healthcare workforce challenges. The analysis is based on a meta-narrative review and document analysis of systematically selected research and grey literature, completed by expert interviews

The findings raise fundamental questions about the capacities for significant changes in primary healthcare workforce policies in the face of multiple crises.