Imagine you are a researcher from a low- or middle-income country who wants to undertake research that would help your country make better decisions about healthcare provision in the nation. However, your country has limited resources.
You know that the solution is ‘evidence-informed decision making’ but you also know that you and your colleagues have very limited capacity in this field. Is this situation familiar to you? Or, is it you?
HITAP International Internship Program might just be what you are looking for.
The Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Program (HITAP) plays a vital advisory role in Thailand in providing rigorous scientific evidence through Health Technology Assessments (HTA) for healthcare decision making to achieve Universal Health Coverage. Hitap provides evidence from a broad range of research activities, i.e. economic evaluation and modeling studies, rapid and systematic reviews of literature, feasibility studies, ex-post and ex-ante studies, as well as system-wide studies. The organization also functions as a secretariat to the Health Economics working group for the National List of Essential Medicines, which oversees the HTA process from topic nomination and prioritization, results appraisal to generating evidence for price negotiations with industry players.
HITAP is continuously growing and it established its international units (HIU) to provide intensive technical and institutional support primarily to countries in Asia with nascent and emerging HTA systems.
The unit works closely with local partners to:
– conduct collaborative research;
– build HTA capacity of researchers in training sessions, conferences, and study visits;
– provide guidance on establishing an HTA agency (looking at governance, committee protocols, and hta processes);
– formulate HTA tools (e.g. economic evaluation guidelines, eq-5d-5l datasets, threshold studies);
– as well as support the linking of hta studies to policy.
This year HITAP will be providing international internship opportunities funded by the Thai Research Fund which is also known as the Senior Research Scholarship (SRS).
This internship program will fund three researchers from low-middle income countries (LMICs) to pursue their own proposed topic for HTA research, under a HITAP supervisor for a maximum duration of 9 months. It will be a tailor-made program based on the needs of the applicants. HITAP and HIU’s work for conducting and incorporating HTA for use in policy making both nationally and internationally will be used for mentorship in this program.
The potential areas include health economics, economic modeling, literature review, feasibility, health system and policy research or one proposed by the applicant!