Organisation of primary health care in the Asia-Pacific region: developing a prioritised research agenda

Palagyi, Anna; Dodd, Rebecca; Jan, Stephen; Nambiar, Devaki; Joshi, Rohina; Tian, Maoyi; Abimbola, Seye; Peiris, David

To progress towards achieving sustainable development in Asia-Pacific LMICs, and UHC, there is a need to identify evidence-based implementation strategies for optimising PHC service delivery and incorporate local system perspectives to identify and prioritise evidence needs. Here, we present a PHC research agenda shaped by regional PHC stakeholder perspectives, and reflect on disparities between the presently sparse evidence base and national evidence priorities. Across each of the five recommended focus areas, a major boost to PHC systems research and research capacity in the Pacific region is critical. The organisation of PHC services is chronically understudied in these small island nations and work across any PHC research domain would represent new knowledge and value add to the evidence base. We encourage a process of codesign between researchers, end-users and decision makers to align PHC research priorities from the outset. We also advocate for use of pragmatic but rigorous research methods that account for PHC system complexity, to accelerate regional learning and transferability of successful interventions. Doing so will help ensure that research investment meets the evidence needs of decision makers, and that findings are both useful and used. open access This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http:// creativecommons. org/ licenses/ by-nc/ 4. 0/.