Seminars

"What will it take to reach the global Sustainable Development Goal for drinking water and sanitation for all by 2030?"

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This seminar will provide an introduction to the global agenda for achieving universal and sustainably managed drinking water and adequate, equitable sanitation and hygiene as set by the international community. It will explore progress to date and outline some of the key approaches and bottlenecks that are seen to be limiting the rate of such progress in the global south. It will also introduce the framework for the Human Right to Water and Sanitation and how this might be relevant for marginalized groups in developed economies.

Harold Lockwood is a water specialist and the director of Aguaconsult, with over thirty years of experience focusing primarily on the rural sub-sector on institutional reform and sector policy development, decentralisation of governance functions, service delivery arrangements and sustainability of services. Harold holds an M.Sc. from Cranfield in rural development as well as a BA in Geography from Sussex University and has worked in 30 countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa, including a long-term position in Pakistan between 1993 and 1995, where he was a technical advisor to the Local Government and Rural Development Department and in Nicaragua from 1996 to 1999 where he was advisor to the National Institute for Water and Sanitation.

Since then, Harold has worked on dozens of assignments for a range of clients including DFID, USAID, UNICEF, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, private sector firms, international NGOs, philanthropic foundations and sector research institutions. In 2011 he co-authored a book on the sustainability of rural water service provision, which has contributed substantively to the way in which policy makers, practitioners and governments think about and support their investments globally. Since 2014, Harold has becoming increasingly involved in systems-based approaches to sector strengthening and change.

"Public health challenges in Lincolnshire and opportunities to address them through partnerships."

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Professor Derek Ward, will give a personal overview of the major public challenges within the county and explore the potential opportunities to develop partnerships with colleagues in the NHS, academic, private and third sectors to address these.

Professor Derek Ward is the Director of Public Health for Lincolnshire County Council, and is currently covering the same role in North Lincolnshire and North East Lincolnshire Councils. He is also a visiting Professor of Public Health at the University of Lincoln. Derek is the Public Health Clinical Research lead within the East Midlands Clinical Research Network (part of the NIHR) and has been on the board of trustees for of the Royal Society of Public Health and a member of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellent (NICE) public health advisory committee. Prior to his current roles he held a dual role within academia and the NHS. He was Director of the Health and Social Care Research Centre and a Professor of Public Health at the University of Derby and provided professional public health advice into the 4 Clinical Commissioning Groups across Derbyshire. Prior to taking up this joint role, he was Director of Public Health for Derby City for 5 years, firstly as an Executive Director within NHS Derby City Primary Care Trust and then latterly as a Chief Officer of Derby City Council. He also has significant experience of national and regional policy work, having been a Consultant in Public Health and a Senior Civil Servant in the Department of Health (DH).

“Beyond key populations: HIV self-testing and secondary distribution in West Africa, lessons learned from the ATLAS project in Cote d'Ivoire, Mali and Senegal”

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The ATLAS program (AutoTest de dépistage du VIH : Libre d’Accéder à la connaissance de son Statut) aimed to promote, implement and scale up HIV self-testing (HIVST) in Côte d'Ivoire, Mali and Senegal. HIVST was integrated into the existing testing policies, programmes and activities. ATLAS HIVST distribution was organised through facility-based channels (delivery of HIVST kits through public or community-based health facilities), and community-based approaches involving outreach activities engaging: Female Sex Workers , Men Who Have Sex with Men, and Persons Who Inject Drugs . Peer educators conducted these outreach activities through group and face-to-face activities. Outreach activities represented the majority (~85%) of ATLAS’s distribution volume. ATLAS activities relied both on primary distribution – HIVST kits were distributed by peer educators and healthcare professionals to primary contacts for their personal use – and secondary distribution. With secondary distribution, primary contacts were invited to redistribute some HIVST kits to their peers, sexual partners, and clients. These secondary contacts were often members of key populations that can be more difficult to engage in HIV prevention, along with other peripheral vulnerable populations. Several research activities and surveys (quantitative, qualitative, costing, modelling…) have been embedded within ATLAS. This communication will present a synthesis of the main findings.

“National and global HIV estimates – how do we arrive at them and how can we improve their accuracy?”

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Where we currently find ourselves in the world of disease surveillance has been informed by many top-down targets and frameworks. Developing global targets and indicators that are relevant to most settings and set at the correct level of resolution to inform action, is challenging. Focusing on the UNAIDS treatment for all targets and global AIDS monitoring indicators, and utilising data from the UK and Southern Africa, I will demonstrate how we can improve our use of routinely collected health data to monitor and inform our response.

“Maps and apps: accelerating disease elimination with data science and technology"

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Diseases are inherently spatially variable, affecting populations in dramatically different ways. Understanding and predicting this variation in space and time offers an opportunity to target limited resources to those who need it, maximising impact of interventions. However, disease programs typically lack the expertise and capacity to analyse spatial data in a meaningful way. This presents a missed opportunity. With a focus on tropical diseases such as malaria and lymphatic filariasis, Hugh will present examples of how machine learning, spatial statistics and technology can be combined and made more accessible to help target and track interventions.

“The North-South Collaborations: approach and opportunities in conducting global health research in rural India”

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Inaugural Lecture

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The lecture will provide insights into the course of the HIV epidemic primarily through the work Prof Tanser has undertaken since 1997 in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. The province is widely considered to be at the epicentre of the global HIV pandemic. Much of his work has focused on a longitudinal cohort of 90,000 individuals in a rural community that has been particularly affected by the disease. The lecture will focus particularly on Prof Tanser's special interest which is the space-time evolution of infectious disease epidemics.

“Intervention Research at Public Health”

Till Bärnighausen is a population health researcher who focuses on three areas of research: (i) establishing the causal impacts of large-scale global health interventions – such as HIV treatment, HIV prevention, and childhood vaccination – on health, economic and social outcomes; (ii) identifying and testing innovations to improve the delivery of global health interventions through public-sector health systems, and (iii) developing new methods for applied population-based health research.

Till has been the principal investigator on grants from a range large science funders, such as the US National Institutes of Health (including five R01 grants), the European Union, the European Commission, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), Elton John AIDS Foundation, and the Clinton Health Access Initiative. He has also received research funding from Harvard, Rush Foundation, William F. Milton Fund, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, International Development Research Centre Canada, USAID, WHO, UNAIDS and World Bank.

Till is Adjunct Professor of Global Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the US and a Senior Faculty at the Wellcome Trust’s Africa Health Research Institute (ARHI) in South Africa.

He has published more than 300 peer-reviewed articles, including in Science, PNAS, Lancet, and PLOS Medicine. His work has been cited more than 17,000 times; his h-index is 63 and his i10-index is 205.

“The importance of context: realist methods for rural health research”

Amanda will use this opportunity to talk about “The importance of context: realist methods for rural health research” Realist methods provide a radical departure from approaches generally used to address complex rural health questions. A radical approach is needed because of the uniqueness of the rural environment. In this presentation Amanda will draw on research studies to illustrate why realist methods are important in identifying causal explanations of why services/interventions may work differently in different contexts. Amanda will explore how realist methods can be used to drive solutions tailored to the population and context.

Professor Amanda Kenny PhD is a rural nurse and midwife and the inaugural Violet Marshman Professor of Rural Health. Amanda led the development of Australia’s largest multidisciplinary rural health school and is currently Director of the Violet Vines Marshman Centre for Rural Health Research. Her research involves extensive partnerships with rural communities. She is internationally recognised for her expertise in innovative methodology, integrated knowledge translation, and is a board member of the Canadian International Institution for Qualitative Methodology. As an expert witness, she has given evidence to major Australian government inquiries. In her career, Amanda has attracted almost AU$105 million dollars of grant funding for research and major strategic initiatives.

“PHE’s work to strengthen Global Health Security and lessons from work to strengthen International Health Regulation capacity for the COVID-19 response”

Professor Neil Squires is Director of Global Public Health for Public Health England, with responsibility for PHE’s global health activity and a Visiting Professor at the University of Lincoln.

Neil has spent the majority of his career working internationally for the Department for International Development, including being the Head of Profession for Health (2011-2014). He spent 4 years working in Mozambique, including being the donor lead for multi-agency support to Mozambique’s Health Sector Wide Approach (SWAp); 2 years working in Bangladesh; 5 years as the Senior Health Advisor for West and North Africa, covering Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone and working on DFID’s Africa Regional Programmes. Neil has also spent 3 years working at the European Commission, during which time he developed the EU Strategy on Human Resources for Health in Developing Countries. Prior to training in Public Health, Neil worked as a District Health Officer in Malawi, and in Leprosy control in India.

“Covid-19: What We Should Have, Could Have, but Did Not Learn from HIV”

Professor Alan Whiteside, OBE, is CIGI Chair in Global Health Policy at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. He has been involved in researching HIV/AIDS for over twenty years and is an internationally recognised academic and AIDS researcher. His current research program focuses on interrelated areas of global health concerns. These include, shifting burdens of disease, immigrant and migrant health, and the economic and social causes and consequences of HIV and AIDS.