Executive Board

Executive Board 2006-2008

Executive Board Bios

President

Walter FLORES (Guatemala)

For the last 15 years, I have been working as a university lecturer, field researcher, project manager and as a consultant in the area of Health Systems Development. My current interests are in the area of policy development and evaluation related to equity in health and health care and the strengthening of health information systems for decision-making. Countries where I have worked include: Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, Ghana, South Africa, Yemen and Syria. My current appointments include: Consultant to the European Union in the theme of social inclusion and equity in Guatemala; Consultant to the Pan-American Health Organization on measuring and monitoring equity of access; Principal researcher of the project: “Strengthening Governance through improvements in Equity and Accountability in Health Systems of Latin American Countries”; Advisor to the observatories of Quality of Life and Equity in Colombia and Venezuela; Member of the Global Equity Gauge Alliance (GEGA).

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Secretary

Tara SINHA (India)

Tara Sinha, M.Phil. (Sociology), MPP (Public Policy), is currently Research Coordinator at Vimo SEWA, Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), Ahmedabad, Gujarat. SEWA is an India-based trade union of 700,000 women workers in the informal economy. Tara has worked in the development sector for over fifteen years, both as a researcher and a programme manager. Most of her work has been in member-based organizations working directly with grassroots groups of women and dalits (socially marginal groups in India). As a researcher she has worked on development issues related to women and socially marginalized communities, including community financing of health care, community health workers, self-image of dalit women, local self-government institutions and microfinance. As programme manager, she has led initiatives for forming women’s self-help groups, for establishing microinsurance programmes and for setting up a livelihood generation programme for artisans. She has written in-house publications and published in refereed journals. In her work at SEWA she has worked closely with SEWA’s health and health insurance programmes. Her most recent research engagement, carried out in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was an action-research project aimed at improving the equity of SEWA’s health insurance programme. She is currently designing monitoring systems for SEWA’s health and insurance programmes. She has presented her work in international fora, the latest being at the Global Forum for Health Research (Mumbai 2005) and the meeting of the International Health Economics Association (Barcelona 2005). She is a trustee of Behavioural Science Center, an Ahmedabad-based organization aimed at strengthening the social position of marginalized social groups in Gujarat, India.

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Treasurer

Said IBRAHIM (USA)

Dr. Ibrahim is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of the Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr. Ibrahim was born in East Africa. He received a BA from Oberlin College, Oberlin Ohio. He completed his medical training at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in 1993. In 1996, he completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. In 1999, he received his MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Ibrahim is a recipient of the Harold Amos Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Award. This award is given to physicians of minority background who have great potential to develop into academic leaders in health care. He is also a recipient of both the entry level and the Advanced level of the VA Health Services Research and Development Award.

Dr. Ibrahim is currently an associate editor of the American Journal of Public Health, the largest public health journal in the world. He is also a core research faculty and member of the executive committee of the VA National Center of Excellence for Health Equity Research and Promotion, Pittsburgh, PA. The VA health care system is the largest integrated free access health care system in the USA. Dr. Ibrahim was the Program Committee Chair for the 2006 Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) Annual Conference which was held in Los Angels, California. Dr. Ibrahim is a member of various study sections including the VA Health Services Research Scientific review program. He is also a member of the National Advisory Board of the new Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program Health Disparities: Findings Answers. He is an ad hoc reviewer for more than 10 health care journals. Dr. Ibrahim’s research focuses on the impact of ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and culture on health care access, utilization and outcomes.

As a leader in established health care organizations such as the SGIM, the VA Health Services Office, and the American Public Health Association, Dr.Ibrahim is in a position to help bring about the collaboration of various health care organizations on global health and health equity. He will assist in expanding the reach of the ISEqH by using his established connections with the afore-mentioned various health care organizations that have emerging interests in global health equity. His goals as an ISEqH executive board member include helping to solidify the ISEqH as a leader in global health equity while expanding the society’s conference into an even larger format for exchange of ideas and evidence regarding global health equity.

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Past President

Armando DE NEGRI (Brazil)

Armando De Negri Filho is a brazilian medical doctor, Master on Epidemiology, medical officer of the Government of the City of Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, where he coordinated during seven years the Planning Section of the Health Secretariat. During this time period Armando installed the Family Health Program with a clear orientation on equity, translated in the criteria for resources allocation and social and health gaps reduction.

As medical officer he has a very active role on the organization of emergency medical care and safety promotion on local and national level, allways following a equity oriented and promotional approach to those challenges, actually he is developing these works commissioned to the Ministry of Health of Brazil.

He developed an equity oriented needs assessment project in the city of Porto Alegre, with an interdisciplinary group, resulting in a new approach for the Participative Budgeting of the City, using the inequities social maps as a guide for evaluation of previous decisions and for prospective ones.

From 2001 to 2003 he was a principal consultant at the Ministry of Health and Social development of the Republic of Venezuela, developing a radical approach for the National Health Law and the National Strategic Social Plan, with a very strong equity oriented approach.

He is acting at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, at the Department of Social Medicine and the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences, developing projects of interest of the local government, which one is the development of the equity oriented evaluation and planning of the participative budgeting process. At the same time he is the coordinator of a unit of promotional strategies and equity at the Institute of Education and Research of the Moinhos de Vento Hospital in the City of Porto Alegre.

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Founding Executive Board Member

Barbara STARFIELD (USA)

Dr. Starfield is University Distinguished Service Professor with appointments in the Department of Health Policy and Management and Pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University Schools of Public Health and Medicine. She is also the director of the Johns Hopkins University Primary Care Policy Center. Dr. Starfield's overriding concerns are understanding the impact of health services on health, especially with regard to the relative contributions of primary care and specialty care on reducing inequities in health. Her focus is both on clinical care and on services to populations as well as the inter-relationships between the two. She received her BA degree from Swarthmore College, her MD degree from the State University of New York (Health Sciences Center in Brooklyn), and her MPH degree from the Johns Hopkins University. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a member of the Institute of Medicine. She is the recipient of numerous national awards, most recently including the first Pew Primary Care Research Award (1994), the Distinguished Investigator Award of the Association for Health Services Research (1995) and the American Public Health Associations=s Martha May Eliot Award (1995). Dr. Starfield was named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners (UK) in 2000.

Dr. Starfield's 1992 book on Primary Care is widely regarded as a seminal contribution to thinking and assessment of the subject. She also has made major contributions in the areas of health status measurement for children and adolescents, and in case-mix assessment and adjustment. Her 1998 book, Primary Care: Balancing Health Needs, Services, and Technology, provides innovative methods to evaluate the attainment and contributions of primary systems and practitioners. It complements the earlier book by highlighting two additional areas: equity in health services and health, and overlap between clinical medicine and public health.

Dr. Starfield was the founding president and first president of the International Society for Equity in Health.

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Board Members

Ross BAILIE (Australia)

Ross is an NHMRC Senior Research Fellow based at Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin, Australia. His current research programs are focussed on improving primary level health services and environmental health in Indigenous Australian communities. His undergraduate training in medicine and his post-graduate training in maternal and child health and public health were undertaken at the University of Cape Town. He spent the several year interval between these courses of study as a clinician in rural general practice in New Zealand and in Accident and Emergency and Paediatrics in South Africa. Ross has published over 50 peer reviewed papers in national and international journals, and is an author on more than 100 other research reports, published letters and conference presentations. In his youth he engaged in such foolish activities as marathon and cross country running, field hockey, rock climbing and flying light aeroplanes. While his physical ability to continue such activities is failing, his competitive and stubborn personality traits persist. He is married to Christine Selvey, with whom he shares two teenage sons.

Having grown up on a farm in apartheid South Africa, trained and practiced in Medicine and public health in that country, and over the past decade worked as a researcher in the field of Indigenous health in Australia, Ross is well aware of the inequities that exist in society and how these can affect health and wellbeing. Ross’ research has focussed on practical ways to improve the health of disadvantaged populations, with a strong emphasis on working in partnership with community organisations and government agencies. The strengths that he could bring to the ISEqH Executive Board therefore include knowledge and skills in primary care, public health and social determinants research, and an international network of practitioners and researchers with interests in these areas.

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Roy CARR-HILL (UK)

Roy Carr-Hill, Professor in Health and Social Statistics at the Centre for Health Economics, University of York (50%) and Research Professor in Education at the Institute of Education in London (also 50%), both in England. He has worked on measurement issues since his time in the OECD helping to develop an internationally agreed set of indicators to monitor the quality of life in the mid-1970s; and in the area of inequalities in health since the beginning of the 1980s. He spent 3 years in Mozambique after their Independence (1978-81) and has worked as a consultant and researcher in developing countries since then.

He is most well-known in the UK for the part he has played in introducing more consistent resource allocation formulae in the health and social sectors (a natural development of a concern with inequalities); and for the work he has done on assessing the potential for skill-mix among health care workers. Both of these have required the development and application of sophisticated analytic tools to address complex methodological problems. In developing countries his forte is designing and implementing evaluations of large scale programmes; and he is particularly concerned with our lack of ability to count the marginalised and poor and the probable impact of the Orwellian ‘war on terrorism’ on social programmes.

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John FURLER (Australia)

John is a senior lecturer at the Department of General Practice at the University of Melbourne. He was co-convener with Elizabeth Harris of the Australian Health Inequalities Research Collaboration Primary Health Care (HIRC PHC) network. The network undertook a national stakeholder consultation on PHC Health inequalities research and capacity issues, an evaluation of how disadvantaged groups access chronic disease self management programs, and held a number of capacity building activities for researchers and evaluators in the field with an interest in health equity.

His work has influenced policy in Australia in the area of health equity and PHC. He has co-authored book chapters on the General Practice/Primary Health Care/Public health interface and more recently on a statistical analysis and overview of General Practice services in Australia. Each of these chapters has incorporated evidence on health inequality in general practice and PHC. In collaboration with the University of New South Wales Centre for GP integration Studies and the Centre for Health Equity Training Research and Evaluation he has evaluated the equity focus of general practice in Australia at both at the local level (through Divisions of general practice) and at the national level.

He is on the editorial board of the Australian Journal of Primary Health and co edited a special edition of the Journal on primary health care and health inequalities. He is currently completing my PhD exploring how social disadvantage influences chronic illness care in Australian general practice, with a focus on diabetes care. He also works part time as a general practitioner at North Richmond Community Health Centre in Melbourne.

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Liliana JADUE (Chile)

Medical doctor graduated from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and Master in Public Health and Epidemiology at the University of Chile. She worked at the Department of Public Health at the Catholic University, developing population studies in chronic diseases risk factors and health promotion programs for general population, also including school-based activities, and community work.

After ten years, she joined the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) representation group in Chile, developing her activities as an epidemiologist and health promotion consultant. Among the projects and activities, with the Ministry of Health and local health service teams, she executed the “CARMEN survey” project and supported the implementation of this initiative in Chile and dissemination of the experience to other countries. CARMEN is a PAHO initiative aimed to improve the health status of populations by reducing the risk factors associated with non-communicable diseases. She left PAHO in 1999.

Around 1997, she collaborated in the design of the Chilean Health Equity Gauge (CHEG), today she is the director of this research team. This group, also a member of GEGA network, has been very active in health equity research, generating relevant work in Chile, published nationally and internationally. Its latest initiative, a Health Equity Observatory, is now available on a website. Between 2002 and 2004, she was also an active collaborator of the Health Reform Committee created in Chile to develop the health sector reform proposal, now being implemented. This reform explicitly includes health equity objectives, based on work done by the CHEG.

At the moment, she is the Director of the “Instituto de Epidemiología y Políticas de Salud Pública” at the Faculty of Medicine, Clinica Alemana-Universidad del Desarrollo, dividing her time between research and teaching. Now she develops research for different institutions in equity subjects, including the Ministry of Health. Her team is also working for the Commission of Social Health Determinants created by WHO, as a co-hub with NICE in the UK, to run the Measurement Knowledge Network, leading the development of methodologies and tools for measuring the causes, pathways and health outcomes of policy interventions to tackle the social determinants of health and health inequities.

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Daniel MACEIRA (Argentina)

Ph.D. in Economics, Boston University, with fields in health economics and industrial organization. He received his bachelor degree in Economics from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), and completed his M.A. in Economics at the Di Tella Institute in Argentina. He develops teaching activities at the B. A. Program and at the Master Program in Economics of the UBA, at the Master in Social Sciences and Health of CEDES-FLACSO, as well as at the Program of Clinical Effectiveness of the UBA, the Italian Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health.

He is currently senior researcher at the Center for the Study of the State and Society (CEDES), Associate Researcher of the investigative branch of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET), Director of the Health Care Area of the Center for the Implementation of Public Policies Promoting Equity and Growth (CIPPEC). He is also Member of the Directive Board of the Master Program in Health Care Administration of the University Institute of the Latin American Center for Human Economy (CLAEH) in Uruguay, Member of the Scientific Committee of the International Health Economics Association (iHEA) and of the Health Forum for Argentina: 10/90 Gap.

Maceira has published several studies in national and international publications. He has conducted numerous research projects and has provided technical assistance to many developing countries, particularly in the Latin America and Caribbean region. He has been working with a wide range of organizations, including the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the United Nations Development Program, and the Pan-American Health Organization, among others.

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Supasit PANNARUNOTHAI (Thailand)

Supasit Pannarunothai is Professor of Community Medicine at Faculty of Medicine, Naresuan University, Phitsanulok, Thailand. His first degree was MD from Mahidol University, Ramathibodi Hospital in Bangkok. He has interest in health equity since he was a community physician at Buddhachinaraj Hospital, Phitsanulok. His PhD thesis for Health Planning and Financing degree at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine then focused on equity in health in Phitsanulok which he started publishing papers in international journals. After serving the Ministry of Public Health for 5 years with various research projects in health finance and casemix systems, he joined the Faculty of Medicine, Naresuan University where he founded the Centre for Health Equity Monitoring in 1998.

Working at a university outside Bangkok has proven no barrier to work for the ministry’s policy or to build linkages with international communities. His research on equity and casemix through the Centre for Health Equity Monitoring contributes to the development and implementation of the universal health coverage policy in Thailand. His work with the Faculty of Medicine has laid foundations for research and teaching. His students from MD, MPH and PhD (Health Systems and Policy programme) enjoy working on defining equity in health within Thai context, measuring horizontal and vertical equity in health. With his seniority and capacity in research and teaching, he is now serving as acting dean of the Faculty.

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Claudio SCHUFTAN (Vietnam)

Claudio Schuftan, M.D. was born in Chile and is currently based in Ho Chi Minh City, where he works as a freelance consultant in public health and nutrition. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of International Health, Tulane School of Public Health, New Orleans, LA. He received his medical degree from the Universidad de Chile in 1970 and completed his residency in Pediatrics and Nutrition in the Faculty of Medicine at the same university in 1973. He studied nutrition planning at MIT in Cambridge, MA in 1975. Dr. Schuftan is the author of 2 books, several book chapters and over fifty scholarly papers published in refereed journals plus over two hundred other assorted publications such as numerous training materials and manuals; lately, he does most of his writings on health and human rights issues. (www.humaninfo.org/aviva) Since 1976, Dr. Schuftan has carried out over one hundred consulting assignments 50 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. He has worked for USAID, UNICEF, WFP, the EU, the ADB, the UNU, DHHS (USA), WHO, IFAD, Sida, FINNIDA, the Peace Corps, FAO, CIDA, the WCC (Geneva) and several international NGOs. His positions have included serving as Long Term Adviser to the PHC Unit of the Ministry of Health in Hanoi, Vietnam under a Sida Project (1995-7); Senior Adviser to the Dept. of Planning, MOH, Nairobi, under a USAID funded project from 1988-93; and Resident Consultant in Food and Nutrition to the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Planning, Yaounde, Cameroon (1981). He is fluent in five major languages. He is currently an active member of the Steering Group of the People’s Health Movement.

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Claudia TRAVASSOS (Brazil)

Claudia Travassos, MD, PhD, is senior researcher of Oswaldo Cruz Foundation and Professor of the disciplines Technological Evaluation and Quality Evaluation in Health Systems and Health Services, and Health Services Utilization at National School of Public Health (ENSP/FIOCRUZ). She has been working on equity in health and health care since 1980s, and this theme was the object of her thesis to obtain the Doctor’s Degree.

Claudia Travassos is a member of the Committee on Social, Economic and Behavioural Research (SEB-TDR/WHO) and, at the beginning of this year, she organized a workshop in Rio de Janeiro entitled “Equitable Access to Health Care and Infectious Disease Control: Concepts, Measurement and Interventions: An International Symposium”.

Dr. Travassos is nationally and internationally recognized for her research on access to health care and her active leadership in bringing attention to this field. She has written extensively in access, equity in health care, social inequality, consumption of health services and quality evaluation, and made several presentations on these themes at national and international meetings. In 2004, she organized a supplement issue of Reports in Public Health (CSP) about Investigation and Evaluation in Health Services with Hillegonda Maria Dutilh Novaes, researcher of University of São Paulo.

Her currently researches are about the occurrence of Adverse Events in Brazilian hospitals, and performance of prevention and treatment of ischemic heart diseases.

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