Participants included stakeholders from academia, policy makers, implementers, civil society and the research community.
The conference was convened to begin to harness knowledge, much of which is tacit and experiential, for design and implementation of UHC, including the national health insurance (NHI). The objectives of the meeting were fourfold:
- Dialogue – to enable dialogue between researchers, policy makers, managers and practitioners on health system strengthening (HSS) and UHC (including the NHI reform) in South Africa;
- Profiling – to profile current health policy and systems research in the country, including international networks which can be leveraged for HSS and UHC in South Africa;
- Priorities – to jointly consider and identify future research priorities for HSS and UHC; and
- Mechanisms – to identify mechanisms for ongoing and future interactions; at national and subnational levels; between researchers and other stakeholders, which support systems learning.