Blog

How can concepts from financial economics strengthen conventional health economic methods for evaluating programs that reduce system-level risk? Conventional health economic evaluations (HEE) are powerful, but are we systematically underestimating the value of our most critical public health programs – like disease elimination and eradication? Our latest paper – ‘Insights from financial economics to value healthcare investments that reduce system-level […]

Malawi faces critical decisions on how to allocate limited health system resources. The Thanzi La Onse (TLO) model is the first whole-population, multi-disease health system model for Malawi. By integrating economic production theory, it helps policymakers understand how shortages of health workers, supplies, and facilities impact health – and how targeted investments can deliver greater health gains. Here, we provide […]

In recent months we have witnessed a dramatic and rapid change to the funding landscape for HIV treatment and prevention across Africa. The withdrawal of USAID and PEPFAR funding has been publicised extensively and this, coupled with anticipated reductions in US contributions to the latest Global Fund renewal, raises serious questions about the sustainability of HIV programmes.  Against the backdrop […]

A paper from Thanzi researchers and collaborators Jessica Ochalek, Gerald Manthalu and Pete Smith, Squaring the cube: towards an operational model of optimal universal health coverage, helps to inform key policy questions in reaching Universal Health Coverage.  Their paper provides a method for trading-off the benefits and costs of expanding the breadth of coverage (i.e., how much of the population […]

Significant resources are committed to improving the data informing healthcare decisions. Data on disease patterns, current health care and health outcomes, and how health could be improved using different interventions, are essential to informing decisions about how to allocate healthcare resources. Given the expanding opportunities to collect data via routine data collection, surveys, surveillance systems, and clinical trials, and the […]

As for many research programmes, institutions and teams around the world, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the move to online working has forced us all to think differently about how to bring people ‘together’ for meetings, training events and workshops in 2020.  Each year, the Thanzi la Onse programme holds a face-to-face International Project Workshop, to reunite programme […]

The novel coronavirus, or COVID-19 as it is also known, has brought along numerous challenges and devastating consequences. And as of the 20th March, 2020 was declared a state disaster in Malawi.  With no specific vaccines or treatment, the best way to prevent and slow down the spread of the virus is frequent hand washing, not touching one’s face, social […]

In February 2020, Thanzi La Onse (TLO) research staff from the Centre for Health Economics (CHE) and Imperial College London (ICL) visited the Health Economics and Policy Unit (HEPU) at College of Medicine, Malawi, to discuss current projects and plan future research. The aims of the research visit were twofold – to bring together UK and Malawi researchers to discuss opportunities […]