As part of the North American Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (NAO) Lecture Series, we welcome Thomas J. Bossert on Wednesday, October 24, 2018 at 4:00 PM at the Faculty Club (41 Willcocks Street, Toronto). Following the lecture, we will present the inaugural Comparative Health System Award in Honour of Les Boehm to this year's recipient, and celebrate with a reception.

This event is free of charge and open to anyone. Forward it to a friend who might be interested.

Why is it so hard to know whether decentralization is a good policy for health systems? Many observers have made unsubstantiated claims for decentralization and federalism in part because there are many different ways to design and implement decentralization and federal policies. It is also very difficult to evaluate the impact of these policies because of the importance of different contexts and of simultaneous policies of funding, payment and service delivery changes in the health sector. We have applied a consistent approach, called "decision space", to show the complex arrangements of decentralization and federal policies in 8 different countries and begin the process of evaluation in the hopes of providing recommendations for policy makers.

Thomas J. Bossert is a Senior Lecturer and the Director of the International Health Systems Program of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. He has many years of experience in international health in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. His innovative "decision space" approach to decentralization has appeared in many prestigious journals and recently in an edited book on decentralization.