At the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic, a number of prestigious research institutes and international organisations have launched initiatives to assess and analyze the measures taken by health systems to curb the spread of the virus. In the middle of March, lecturers from the Department of Health Economics and Management were invited to join two of the networks as experts for Bulgaria and to periodically analyze the government measures.
The first network has been initiated by London School of Economics and includes short reports on various countries around the world, published on the pages of Cambridge University Press, in the specially created section "Country Responses to the Covid19 Pandemic". Reports are to be updated at the beginning of each month till the end of the pandemic. You can get acquainted with the report on Bulgaria, authored by Rositsa Koleva (University of Oxford), Prof. Antoniya Dimova and Assoc. Prof. Maria Rohova, here.
The European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, together with the World Health Organization and the European Commission, also in March, launched the initiative of COVID-19 Health System Response Monitor, which is a part of the Health System Policy Monitor (HSPM).
Medical University – Varna, through the Department of Health Economics and Management, has been a partner and the only representative for Bulgaria of HSPM since 2013. Not only the measures of health systems to combat the epidemic have been presented and analyzed in the new expert network, but also government decisions to mitigate economic and social consequences. The site of Bulgaria, maintained by the team of the Department of Health Economics and Management, can be accessed here.
