BU Research Blog

The year 2021 started in many ways in the same way as it had ended with a country gripped in COVID-19 and a national lock down to limit the spread of the disease.  It is appropriate timely that the first publication from our international  collaboration, studying the health system in Nepal, focuses on COVID-19 [1].  This academic paper forms part of our on-going study of the decentralisation of the Nepal health system. The study is run by the University of Sheffield, the University of Huddersfield and Bournemouth University in the UK and PHASE Nepal and Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences in Nepal. The study is funded by the UK Health Systems Research Initiative.

This paper was unplanned as nobody (neither in the UK or in Nepal) had heard of COVID-19 when we submitted the grant application in mid-2019.  It was only when we started our project officially in April 2020 that COVID-19 had become the pandemic it is today.  We took the opportunity to assess some of the early evidence on the effectiveness of the actions taken to deal with COVID-19 by the national government as well as provincial and local governments and the levels of cooperation and coordination between them.

Authors on this include BU PhD graduate Dr. Pratik Adhikary and FHSS Visiting Professor Padam Simkhada, as well as our collaborator on other funded projects, Dr. Sujan Marahatta from Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences (Nepal).

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

Reference:

1.  Adhikary P, Balen J, Gautam S, Ghimire S, Karki JK, Lee AC, Marahatta SB, Pandey S, Pohl G, Ruston S, Sapkota S, Simkhada PP, Subedi M, van Teijlingen ER, on behalf of the NFHS Team. The COVID-19 pandemic in Nepal: Emerging evidence on the effectiveness of action by, and cooperation between, different levels of government in a federal system. Journal of Karnali Academy of Health Sciences. 2020; 3(3)