What is translation?

What is ‘translation’, and how might it help us think differently about knowledge transfer and exchange? The purpose of this article is to set out, for policy makers and practitioners, the theoretical and conceptual resources that translation holds and seems to represent.

Comparing health systems

This chapter reviews the modes and functions of cross-national comparison in health services research and policy. Source: Mullner, R (ed) Encyclopaedia of Health Services Research, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage link SaveSave

A National Health Service, by comparison

The National Health Service (NHS) has always been compared to other things, to other organizations and systems both at home and abroad. This paper explores those comparisons, beginning with the origins of national public health care in Lloyd George’s study of German social insurance, and ending with Gordon Brown’s claims for the NHS as ‘the best insurance policy in the world’.

Dawit Wondimagegn

is a psychiatrist working in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He spent 3 months in Edinburgh at the end of 2008, as Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre of African Studies.

Learning by meeting

It has become something of a truism that organisational and political environments are internationalised, and that policy making is informed at least in part by increased understanding of what takes place in parallel domains and jurisdictions.

Andrew McFadyen

is a journalist and former Head of Communications for the Scottish Labour Party. His doctoral thesis assessed Donald Dewar’s role in Scottish devolution.

Jo Maybin

worked previously as a social affairs analyst for BBC News and is now Fellow in health policy at the King’s Fund in London. She held a Bernard Crick Fellowship at Edinburgh, where her doctoral research analysed ways of knowing in policy work in England’s...

Evgeniya Plotnikova

worked at research centres in Perm and Moscow, and completed an internship at the ILO in Geneva. Her doctoral research investigated the role of bilateral agreements in international staff recruitment to the NHS. She is now Research Fellow in the Global Public Health...