An essay by Rebecca Hodes, a post-doctoral fellow in the AIDS and Society Research Unit, has been shortlisted in a competition run by the First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research. Hodes’s essay is titled ‘How health systems research championed South Africa’s roll-out of antiretroviral treatment’. It documents how health systems research helped to win the Treatment Action Campaign’s 2001 court case for public access to drugs for the prevention-of-mother-to-child-transmission (PMTCT) of HIV. An affidavit written by Helene Schneider in support of TAC’s case used government’s own published reports to prove there was adequate latent capacity within public health care structures to provide nevirapine in antenatal clinics. This disqualified government’s argument that its health systems would buckle under the distribution of PMTCT. The essay will be published in an anthology by the Global Forum for Health Research and The Lancet.
