Aid alignment for global health research: the role of HIROs

The lack of a mechanism that aligns financial flows for global health research towards public health priorities limits the impact of health research on health and health equity. Collaborative groups of health research funders appear to be particularly well situated to ameliorate this situation and to initiate discussion on aid alignment for global health research. One such group is the Heads of International Research Organizations (HIROs), which brings together a large number of major government and philanthropic funders of biomedical research. Surprisingly, there is hardly any information publicly available on HIROs' objectives, or on how it aims to achieve more harmonization in the field of research for health. Greater transparency on HIROs' objectives and on its current efforts towards addressing the gap between global health research needs and investments would be desirable, given the enormous potential benefits of more coordination by this group

A checklist for health research priority setting: nine common themes of good practice

Health research priority setting processes assist researchers and policymakers in effectively targeting research that has the greatest potential public health benefit. Many different approaches to health research prioritization exist, but there is no agreement on what might constitute best practice. Moreover, because of the many different contexts for which priorities can be set, attempting to produce one best practice is in fact not appropriate, as the optimal approach varies per exercise. Therefore, following a literature review and an analysis of health research priority setting exercises that were organized or coordinated by the World Health Organization since 2005, we propose a checklist for health research priority setting that allows for informed choices on different approaches and outlines nine common themes of good practice. It is intended to provide generic assistance for planning health research prioritization processes. The checklist explains what needs to be clarified in order to establish the context for which priorities are set; it reviews available approaches to health research priority setting; it offers discussions on stakeholder participation and information gathering; it sets out options for use of criteria and different methods for deciding upon priorities; and it emphasizes the importance of well-planned implementation, evaluation and transparency