Contributors

Mauricio Avendano is Associate Professor at the University of Lausanne, and co-director of the Health Policy Unit at the Department of Epidemiology and Health Systems at Unisanté. He is a quantitative social scientist doing research on the impact of public policies and social changes on health and inequalities. He is also adjunct Associate Professor at Harvard University, and visiting professor at King’s College London
Sarah Louise Barber is Director of the WHO Centre for Health Development (the Kobe Center) in Kobe Hyogo, Japan. Established in 1995, the WHO Centre for Health Development (WKC) since 2016 successfully built research capacities and partners with >100 global and Japanese institutes in health systems and financing in response to population ageing and health emergencies and disaster risk management. Dr Barber is a health economist and policy specialist, and holds doctorate and post-doctorate qualifications from the University of California, Berkeley. Before becoming Director of the WHO Kobe Centre, she worked on strategic policy issues with WHO, including as Senior Health Policy Advisor in the Office of the Regional Director for Africa, WHO Representative to South Africa, Team Leader for Health Systems Development in China, and Health Policy Advisor in Indonesia and Cambodia. Prior to working with WHO, she was managing evaluation research at the University of California Berkeley’s Institute of Business and Economic Research, and the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico. Over the past 25 years, she has published widely on diverse topics in health economics and policy analysis, including the role of the private health care sector, conditional cash transfers, human resources, insurance and provider payment reforms, quality of care assessments, policies for essential medicines, monitoring and evaluation, migration, and fiscal policies.
Ludovico Carrino is Senior Lecturer of Public Economics at the Department of Economics, Business, Mathematics and Statistics ‘Bruno de Finetti’ at the University of Trieste, as well as Visiting Professor at the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London. His research is in applied public economics, with particular focus on Long-Term Care for older individuals, the Economics of Ageing and Pensions, as well as Welfare Economics and Multi-dimensional measurement of Wellbeing and Quality of Life. Ludovico is involved as leader or investigator in numerous international research projects investigating the links between public policies, population well-being and inequalities, as well as the social determinants of health. He wrote a book on the Economics of Long-Term Care in Europe (Palgrave) and has published his research in leading journals in the fields of Economics, Gerontology and Epidemiology. His research employs quantitative methods on large survey data to measure the causal impact of public policies on well-being and quality of life. He has worked as an external consultant for the World Health Organization Kobe Centre for Health Development. Prior to joining the University of Trieste, Ludovico was Research Fellow at King’s College London and Research Associate at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venezia.
Adelina Comas-Herrera is Director of Global Observatory of Long-Term Care, a new platform to facilitate cross-national learning to improve and strengthen care systems, part of the International Long-Term Care Policy Network. She works as a researcher at the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre, where she is currently principal investigator of the Strengthening Responses to Dementia in England (STRiDE England) project, which uses individual experiences as a lens through which to analyse inequalities in access to dementia care at local and national level. She was previously co-lead of the international STRiDE project, which generated research to strengthen responses to dementia in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kenya, Mexico and South-Africa. Her background is in economics and has spent much of her career working on projections of future demand for Long-Term Care and associated expenditure, and exploring the implications of different approaches to financing Long-Term Care in the United Kingdom and other countries.
Eva Cyhlarova is Senior Research Fellow at the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre (CPEC), London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She has worked on a range of projects in mental health, social care, and dementia at CPEC since 2014. Previously, Eva was Head of Research at the Mental Health Foundation, a UK-wide charity, where she developed and managed research and evaluation projects in mental health, learning disabilities, and dementia. She also has experience working in the medical communications industry. Eva has a DPhil in Psychology from the University of Oxford. Examples of her work include an evaluation of the Screen and Treat programme for people affected by the 2015-2016 terrorist attacks in Tunisia, Paris and Brussels; a United Nations study of the effects of COVID-19 on institutional care; and, recently, a study of the psychological support needs for individuals and their families affected by NHS-supplied infected blood and blood products.
Jonathan Cylus is Head of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies’ London Hubs based at both the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine as well as a Senior Health Economist in the WHO Barcelona Office for Health Systems Financing. His main research is on health systems, focusing primarily on health financing policy, health economics and health system performance. He has worked on these topics in a wide range of countries as well as with international organizations including the European Commission and OECD. Prior to joining the Observatory, Jon was an economist at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in the United States where he worked on health care expenditure projections, hospital productivity, and health care expenditure estimates by age and gender.
Astrid Eriksen is Research Fellow with the Technische Universität Berlin. She is also part of the team contracted to work with the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies at the Berlin hub. Her primary research interests include coverage of and access to health services, service delivery, and health system performance assessment. She supports various Observatory projects, including the State of Health in the EU profiles and the Health Systems in Action Insights pilot series. She also serves as an editor for the Health System Review (HiTs) on Denmark and Hungary. She holds a master’s in political science from Aarhus University, Denmark.
Zhanlian Feng is Senior Researcher in the Aging, Disability, and Long-Term Care program at RTI International. He has over 20 years of experience in long-term care and health services research for older people in the United States and internationally. He specializes in using health care administrative data and quantitative research methods for health policy analysis and program evaluation, with a focus on the Medicare-Medicaid dually eligible population. He has led evaluations of recent health care payment and service delivery models for the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services Innovation Center of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, including the Medicare-Medicaid Financial Alignment Initiative and the Initiative to Reduce Avoidable Hospitalizations among Nursing Facility Residents. He is also a leading international expert on long-term care systems and policies. He has led groundbreaking studies in China documenting the growth and characteristics of elder care facilities and offering key policy recommendations towards building an efficient and sustainable long-term care system. Through work commissioned by the World Bank, he has contributed to understanding policy responses and emerging long-term care systems in low- and middle-income countries in the context of global population aging.
Ishtar Govia is a psychologist and senior lecturer with the Jamaica-based Epidemiology Research Unit of the Caribbean Institute for Health Research, The University of the West Indies. Her methodological areas of expertise include: qualitative; mixed methods; equitable co-production; design, development, evaluation of complex interventions. Her substantive areas include: social determinants of health; shared risk and protective factors; context-, lifespan-, and gender-sensitive holistic and integrated approaches for prevention and management of NCDs, especially mental and neurological conditions, dementia and cardiovascular disease. Central to Dr Govia’s work is the cultivation of partnerships and capacity building for health and social care research in the Caribbean, small island developing states, LMICs, and resource-constrained contexts in HICs. During her time as a Visiting Research Fellow at the UCL’s IAS, she will be exploring equity-informed approaches to integrated management of multimorbidity in LMICs.
Tiago Cravo Oliveira Hashiguchi is a Senior Health Specialist in the World Bank based in Washington, D.C. His main research is on health policy, focusing primarily on digital health policy, health data governance, and health economics. As part of his work at international organizations, he has conducted research on a wide range of other topics in many countries. Prior to joining the World Bank, Tiago was a Health Policy Analyst at the OECD in Paris, France, where he worked on digital health, antimicrobial resistance, and social protection for long-term care in old age. Tiago has held senior research positions at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle, and Imperial College London. Tiago has a M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, and a Ph.D. in Health Management from Imperial College London.
Bo Hu is Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at Care Policy and Evaluation Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests are: long-term care policy, utilisation and financing, dementia care, unmet needs, life course research, and healthy ageing. Bo uses quantitative methods in his research.
Manfred Huber joined WHO Regional Office for Europe in 2009, where he provided advice to Member States in Europe on the implementation of the Decade of Healthy Ageing, until his retirement in April 2023. His area of expertise is health and long-term care reform for healthy ageing; age-friendly environments and communities. Prior to this, he was Director of Health and Care with the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research in Vienna. Moreover, he worked for ten years with the OECD in Paris. In this role he oversaw ageing and health, OECD Health Data and the development of the international System of Health Accounts. Manfred Huber has authored several books on health and social services for ageing populations. He has over 30 years of experience with international comparisons of health and social policy.
Graduated from University of Munich with a Master of Science in Mathematics. He also holds a PhD in Economics.
Stefania Ilinca is a Technical Advisor on long-term care with the WHO Regional Office for Europe, a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health and a Salzburg Global Seminar fellow. Her work focuses on innovation and service design in health and long-term care systems and on promoting equity in access to long-term care, with particular attention to strengthening care delivery for people with complex needs, promoting integrated care models and protecting the health and wellbeing of formal and informal caregivers. She has extensive experience working at the interface between policy and research, dividing her time between policy advice, technical support, applied research and advocacy, with a comparative, European focus. Prior to joining WHO Europe, Stefania has worked as a researcher and policy advisor at the European Centre for Social Welfare and Policy Research in Vienna and at Trinity College Dublin.
Hee-Kang Kim is a professor in the Department of Public Administration at Korea University. Her research and teaching interests are in care ethics, justice theory, and normative policy analysis. Most recently she published a book, Caring Democratic State (in Korean, 2022) exploring the philosophical background and the normative justification of a caring state and its institutional and policy design, which won the best academic book awarded by Seojong Book. In addition, she is the author of other award-winning books and edited volumes including Normative Policy Analysis (in Korean), Care & Fairness (in Korean), and Critiques of Korean Multiculturalism (in Korean). Her articles appeared in various peer-reviewed, impact-factor journals including Critical Social Policy, Public Affairs Quarterly, Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, International Journal of Care and Caring, Ethics and Social Welfare, and Women’s Studies International Forum. Hee-Kang has been a Care Ethics Research Consortium steering member since 2017.
Kai Leichsenring is the Executive Director of the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research (affiliated to the United Nations) in Vienna, Austria. His background is in Political Sciences/Social Policy (Dr.phil., University of Vienna) and Organisational Development Consultancy. During his career as a researcher, he specialised in comparative and applied social research with a focus on ageing, health and long-term care, and related issues such as governance and financing, needs assessment, quality management, labour conditions, user involvement and informal care. Apart from coordinating national and European R&D projects he consulted a number of regional and national governments, and international agencies. He designed and facilitated workshops, conferences and trainings, and published a wide range of reports, books and articles.
Ana Llena-Nozal is leading the long-term care work at OECD since January 2018. She coordinates several topics on long-term care and ageing such as dementia care, the future of the long-term care workforce, social protection and funding in long-term care, the impact of COVID-19 in long-term care services, policies to promote healthy ageing and end-of-life care. Before joining the OECD, Ms. Llena-Nozal was a researcher at the Institute of Development Studies (Sussex University), Utrecht University and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her previous research includes international comparative projects in the areas of education, labour market policy and health inequalities.
Juliette Malley is an Associate Professorial Research Fellow at the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She co-directs the Social Care Rapid Evaluation Team and is Deputy Director of the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Policy Innovation and Evaluation with responsibility for social care. Her research focuses on innovations in the delivery and organisation of adult social care; evaluation of complex interventions, including issues relating to the measurement of user experience, quality and outcomes; and the governance, performance and reform of long-term care systems. She has advised the English Department of Health and Social Care, Social Care Wales, OECD, NICE and NIHR on these topics. All of her work is underpinned by a concern with making the research useful to and usable by policymakers, practitioners and the public.
Jayeeta Rajagopalan is a Research Officer at the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre (CPEC) at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Prior to this, she worked as an Early Career Researcher (ECR) on the Strengthening Responses to Dementia in Developing Countries (STRiDE) project at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) in India between 2020-2022. She holds a BSc in Global Health and Social Medicine from King’s College London and an MSc in Global Health Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
José Carlos Ortega Regalado is a Research Associate in the Economics department of the University of Trieste. His research concentrates on long-term care systems for older people, focusing on access and effectiveness of public support. José Carlos has contributed to national health system reviews in partnership with international organisations such as the European Commission and the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies. Before his position at the University of Trieste, he was a Statistician at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), working primarily on long-term care, health systems monitoring, and cancer care.
Ricardo Rodrigues is currently an Assistant Professor at the Lisbon School of Economics and Management (ISEG) in the University of Lisbon and a consultant for the World Health Organization (WHO) Kobe Centre. His main research focuses on financing of long-term care, inequalities in health and inequalities in the use and provision of care, particularly those related to gender and socio-economic condition. His research mostly takes a comparative view across different care systems and care norms. He has worked with different national governments on long-term care reform, namely in Portugal, Slovenia, Romania, Austria, and international organizations such as the European Commission and the WHO. Ricardo was previously the Head of the Health and Care Unit and deputy director of the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research, in Vienna, Austria.
Cassandra Simmons is a researcher in the Health and Care team at the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research, based in Vienna (Austria). An economist by training, her research focuses on the sustainability and equitable development of long-term care systems, with a concentration on financing, inequalities in access and use, informal care, the care workforce, among others, with a specific focus on European countries. Part of her work also involves bridging the gap between academic findings and policy, such as through trainings and mutual learning events on long-term care-related topics. Her experience prior to the European Centre includes an internship in international drug control with the International Narcotics Control Board within UNODC and in public policy related to pharmaceuticals at Hoffmann-La Roche.
Gemma Frances Spiers is a Senior Research Associate at Newcastle University, working across both the NIHR Healthy Ageing Policy Research Unit and the NIHR Innovation Observatory as Ageing Lens Lead. Her work focuses on ageing at the intersection of health and social care, and the role of equitable access to care in healthy ageing outcomes. Prior to joining Newcastle University, Gemma worked at the Social Policy Research Unit at the University of York.
Katherine Swartz is a health economist whose research has focused on why Americans lack health insurance, including how companies compete in health insurance markets, and on health policy issues facing the United States and other OECD countries with aging populations. Her research related to aging issues has concentrated on how to finance and organize long-term care. She has been a member of the faculty of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health since 1992. Professor Swartz is a member of the American Academy of Medicine. She was the 1991 recipient of the David Kershaw Award from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) for research done before the age of 40 that has had a significant impact on public policy. Between 1995 and 2007, Professor Swartz was the Editor of Inquiry, a journal that focused on health care organization, provision and financing, and she was President of APPAM in 2009. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty, Professor Swartz was a Senior Researcher at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. She also has been a visiting professor at Brown University and Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, and a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.
Professor Swartz earned her PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her BS in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Florian Tille is a member of the Observatory’s Berlin hub. His work focuses on evidence-informed health policy and health care for strengthening health systems in Europe, and particularly on the Observatory’s analytical pillar on health systems innovation and the way organizational change is adopted. He supports country monitoring (particularly in the East of the region) and contributes to knowledge brokering with evidence briefings and policy dialogues. Florian is also central to the Observatory’s collaboration with the European Commission on cancer in the context of the EU Mission on Cancer and Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan. Prior to joining the Observatory, Florian was a Technical Officer with the Division of Country Health Policies and Systems at WHO Regional Office for Europe (EURO), and with the Integrated Health Services Department at WHO Headquarters in Geneva, working on quality of care, health services resilience, emergency preparedness and response. Before that, he worked at the International Department of Germany’s Federal Ministry of Health. Florian holds a doctorate in public health from the Charité Medical University in Berlin, a Master of Public Policy from the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, and a BA from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Ewout van Ginnekenis the Coordinator of the Berlin hub of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies at the Berlin University of Technology. His expertise is in comparative international health systems research and health policy research. His main interests include health financing, health access, insurance competition, care purchasing, integrated care, and cross-border care. He has published widely on these topics in international peer-reviewed literature and the wider literature. He is a series coordinator of the Health Systems in Transition (HiT) series and has co-authored the HiT template as well as several reviews including on the health-care systems of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Slovenia and the United States of America. Before joining the Observatory, Ewout was a senior researcher at the Berlin University of Technology and a 2011–2012 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice at the Harvard School of Public Health. He holds a master’s degree in health policy and administration from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and a PhD in public health from the Berlin University of Technology.
George Wharton is Associate Professor (Education) of Health Policy. With a professional background in finance, the UK Civil Service, and the English NHS, George’s work focusses on a broad range of themes in comparative international health policy. At LSE, George teaches and mentors MSc students in international health policy and financing, directs the Executive MSc in Health Economics, Policy and Management, and works on a variety of teaching, research and advisory partnerships, including the Partnership for Health System Sustainability and Resilience (www.phssr.org). He has consulted and written for national governments, international organisations, philanthropic foundations and industry bodies, and has authored articles on health systems and policies in the BMJ and The Lancet, among others. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the British Journal of Healthcare Management, and is a Board Trustee of the Paul Strickland Scanner Centre, a charity which provides leading-edge radiology services at the NHS Mount Vernon Cancer Centre.
Raphael Wittenberg is an associate professorial research fellow and deputy director of the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre (CPEC) at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His main research is on long-term care for older people and people with learning disabilities, including projections of future demand for care, unpaid care by family and friends, and care for people with dementia. He was deputy director of the Centre for Health Services Economics and Organisation at the University of Oxford and previously a senior economist at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).
Valentina Zigante is a research fellow at the Care Policy and Evaluations Centre (CPEC) at the London School of Economics. Her main research is focused on the governance and management of adult social care services, unpaid/family/informal care, and evaluations, in particular of care technologies, often with a comparative European focus. Prior to joining CPEC, Valentina worked at the University of Bristol, UNPD Croatia and the Eurofound.
This edited volume is a tri-partite collaboration between the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, the WHO Centre for Health Development (WHO Kobe), and the WHO Regional Office for Europe. The editors and chapter authors would like to thank all three for their financial and intellectual contributions towards this book.

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