Kara Hanson
SD
Professor
of Health System Economics and Dean, Faculty of Public Health and Policy, Director Centre for Health Economics in London
LSHTM
15-17 Tavistock Place
London
WC1H 9SH
United Kingdom
My training is in development economics and health economics, and I have worked on health systems organisation and financing, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, since 1988. I did my doctorate at the Harvard School of Public Health, and joined LSHTM in 1997.
Centres
Teaching
I give a lecture on Economic Analysis for Health Policy in Term 2 and tutor on the MSc in Public Health for Development. My research degrees students are studying topics including health system resilience, costs and effects of deliverying public health services, approaches to measuring progress towards Universal Health Coverage, and service integration.
Research
My research has focused primarily on the economics of health systems in low- and middle-income countries. I have done research on hospital sector reforms in Uganda and Zambia, focusing on the implications of two-tier pricing for equity of access to hospital services. I am interested in the role of the private sector in health systems, and in identifying the opportunities and limitations of the private sector in improving the efficiency, quality and responsiveness of health systems. This includes a particular interest in novel approaches to regulation, particularly in relation to market disruptions such as provider consolidation and epharmacy. I am also interested in health financing reforms, particularly the way that strategic purchasing can help to improve health system outcomes. I work with a DFID funded project on education systems research, contributing insights from the development of health systems research methods.
My second area of focus is the economics of malaria control interventions. In particular, I am interested in understanding better how to expand access to interventions that have been shown to be cost-effective. Recent activities in this area include the ACTWatch Project, studying the market for antimalarial medicines (www.actwatch.info) and a linked grant from the ESRC Secondary Data Analysis Initiative to estimate the demand for antimalarials; and economic evaluations of a range of interventions addressing malaria in pregnancy (http://www.mip-consortium.org); and the Independent Evaluation of the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria, which is an innovative financing mechanism for antimalarial drugs.
I have a particular interest in the evaluation of complex health system interventions and am a member of the Centre for Evaluation (http://evaluation.lshtm.ac.uk/), the Malaria Centre (http://malaria.lshtm.ac.uk), and the Centre for Global Noncommunicable Diseases.
In 2018 we launched the Centre for Health Economics in London (CHIL). Please visit our web page to find out about our work and download our most recent newsletter.
Selected Publications
