Professor Lucy Gilson is a co-recipient of this year’s prestigious Virchow Prize for Global Health for her life’s work in health policy and systems research. Lucy, Head of the Health Policy and Systems Division in the School of Public Health at the University of Cape Town and Professor of Health Policy and Systems at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, won the award alongside Johan Rockström from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research for “their holistic and systems-based approach to safeguarding human and planetary health.”
Lucy is a longtime supporter of the Alliance, having served on its Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) between 2009 and 2015. She has been a thought leader in the field, ensuring a focus on policy and the often-messy process of policy-making. She has stewarded the Health policy analysis fellowship, an important Alliance-supported capacity strengthening initiative with more than 20 fellows benefiting from their engagement across two cohorts. She is also a co-editor of the seminal Health policy analysis reader: the politics of policy change in low- and middle-income countries published by the Alliance.
The Virchow Foundation, in awarding Lucy, lauded her contributions “to the development of Health Policy and Systems Research (HPSR) as a widely recognized field of importance to drive improvements in health service delivery.” They note that her work, “underscores that a comprehensive understanding of how health systems react and adapt to health policies and their corresponding measures requires interdisciplinarity and cross-sectoral collaboration in sociology, anthropology, political science and economy, particular in relation to medicine, public health and epidemiology. […] Lucy not only focuses on these areas from a strategic and policy perspective, but also contributes to the understanding of how health policies and interventions can effectively be implemented in demanding real world-settings, for example by examining both facilitators and barriers to implementation.
At the Sixth Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in 2018, Lucy was also a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from Health Systems Global for her service to the field of HPSR.
Lucy received the award on stage at the Rotes Rathaus in Berlin, Germany, where she suggested that: “The work that I’ve done has been part of a community, and in many ways the contributions that I have made have been in the realm of ideas that people find useful for their own activities and in the realm of networks and network building. And I strongly believe that to address the challenges we are facing, we need networks of people in different parts of the world at different levels of the system who leverage collective power. […] This prize is an opportunity for us to continue to grow and build a community of practice of people who fight for social justice. For me, it’s about working through people and with people to try to deliver on the improvements in people’s lives that we all seek.”
Jeanette Vega, the Vice Chair of the Alliance and Former Minister of Social Development and Family in Chile, congratulated Lucy on the honour, recalling fondly their time together on the STAC: “I learned so much from Lucy. The most important thing that I learned is that you can be a smart leader and very humble leader at the same time.”
“It's such a well-deserved honour,” remarked Kumanan Rasanathan, Executive Director of the Alliance. “It's an honour also for our field of health policy and systems research, to which you are such a giant and to which you have contributed so much.” He added, “And on a personal level, I'd like to thank you for your inspiration and how much I've learned from you, along with, I think, literally thousands of people in the UK, in the Western Cape, throughout Africa and throughout the world.”