What makes a public health campaign successful?

The best performing countries in public health share many factors that contribute to their success. That is the conclusion of a study published on May 9 in the open access journal PLOS Global Public Health by Dr. Nadia Akseer, an epidemiologist-biostatistician at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and co-author of the study, and colleagues in the Exemplars in Global Health (EGH) program.

In recent years, the EGH program has begun identifying and studying positive outliers when it comes to global health programs around the world, with the goal of discovering not only which health interventions work, but also how they have been successfully implemented. The identified outliers have had exceptional success relative to the economic status of the countries in which they occur.

In the new study, researchers systematically analyzed 31 previous EGH studies on six topics, including under-five mortality, child stunting, community health workers (CHW), vaccine delivery, COVID-19 response, and reducing neonatal and maternal mortality. The studies included data from 19 countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Caribbean. The EGH team searched these countries for common themes and findings that resulted in programmatic success.

Overall, the driving forces most often seen in EGH’s positive outliers can be grouped into eight themes: efficient data systems, effective leadership, effective stakeholder coordination, a capacitated workforce, intentional women’s empowerment, a conducive national policy environment, sustainable financing, and reach. These themes align with previous efforts aimed at identifying the drivers of global health improvements and with the World Health Organization’s Health Systems Framework.

The authors say the new findings reinforce a set of cross-cutting principles that should inform national health policies and strategies. “We hope that by summarizing the common factors among countries that can maximize impact, the findings from this study can help funders, policymakers and other stakeholders understand strategies to achieve optimal outcomes in the field health care and human development,” they write.

Dr. Akseer added: “When analyzing 19 countries worldwide, Exemplars in Global Health found that those making the greatest progress in public health all focused on similar priorities. By sharing key lessons about how they improved, we hope we can help country leaders, funders and global partners create evidence-based policies that best allocate resources – thereby improving health outcomes around the world.”