World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Health Services Performance

The global network of IGPH, with its strong partners in Asia and Africa, has major expertise in the field of program science where research is embedded and conducted in close collaboration with governments to produce actionable information.

The expertise is now mobilized to contribute to WHO’s work on PHC services and will include development and testing of:

• methods and innovations for assessing and analyzing community health needs and barriers to access to and utilization of services
• methods and tools for the assessment of the availability and quality of health services
• methods and innovations to assess and analyze the performance of district health systems including health facilities

The Collaborating Centre is headed by the IGPH director, professor James Blanchard, working in close collaboration with professor Ties Boerma and senior staff at the University of Manitoba in Canada, as well as experts from the IGPH collaborating partner institutions in India, Pakistan, Kenya and Nigeria, and collaborators in the Countdown to 2030 for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health.

The Collaborating Centre’s work in 2021 focuses on supporting WHO’s work on health services and the COVID-19 pandemic by contributions to guidance documents, data collection instruments for key informant surveys and health facility assessments, and analytical work on the impact of the pandemic on the continuation of health services.