Applied systems thinking for health systems managers and researchers in Iran: Virtual course

Health systems are complex adaptive systems. They often operate in rapidly changing social, political and economic environments They are further characterized by difficult governance from multiple stakeholders with different agendas and interests, fragmented sub-systems, multiple non-aligned financing arrangements, and incoherent information flows. This makes intervening in health systems a difficult, necessary, and exciting endeavour. Systems thinking and system thinking tools are designed to address such complex systems and can help policy makers, health system managers, development agents, health system researchers or the public make sense of this complexity and propose appropriate interventions to improve health system performance.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has been advocating the application of system thinking in various parts of health systems. Health systems are extremely complicated environments, under constant changes, and influenced by numerous factors, many of which are partially or completely beyond the health sector and healthcare interventions scopes. Hence, “system thinking” approach while tackling issues of the healthcare system.

Given the complexities of the Iranian healthcare system, and in consideration of the rapid changes and unforeseen challenges that healthcare systems have seen during the recent years, familiarizing health professionals with and implementing system thinking method is a pressing need.

We conducted joint Systems thinking course as a collaboration between Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute and School of Public Health atTehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran with three main objectives:

·       To draw of the expertise and experience of the two universities to integrate systems thinking methods in research projects and teaching activities in both institutions;

·       To increase systems thinking capacity in Iranian researchers, policy makers and health system managers;

·       To generate new hypothesis on how the Iranian health systems can be improved using a systems thinking approach.

Project Report is available HERE