Headquarters Charlbury, Oxford, UK | Website Official website | |
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Type Global Knowledge Network Coordinator Dr. Neil Pakenham-Walsh | ||
Healthcare Information For All (HIFA) is a global network of health professionals, publishers, librarians, technologists, researchers, and policymakers. Formerly known as HIFA2015 (Healthcare Information For All by 2015), the network was rebranded as HIFA in 2014. They have over 16,000 members from 2500 separate organisations in 175 countries worldwide.
Contents
HIFA was formally launched in October 2006 at the 10th Congress of the Association for Health Information and Libraries in Africa in Mombasa, Kenya. The network is administered by the Global Healthcare Information Network, a nonprofit organisation based in the United Kingdom. Universal and user-friendly access to relevant, reliable health information is considered a vital part of meeting the World Health Organization's goal of Health For All and the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals.
Mission
The HIFA vision is: "A world where every person and every health worker will have access to the healthcare information they need to protect their own health and the health of others". HIFA addresses the information needs of citizens as well as health workers and health policymakers, recognising the importance of citizens, parents and children as providers of care, especially in low-resource settings where health workers may be absent or hard to reach. The HIFA vision is supported by more than 280 health and development organisations worldwide, including the British Medical Association; BioMed Central; CAB International; Cochrane Collaboration; Hesperian Foundation; ICCDR, B; International Confederation of Midwives; International Council of Nurses; London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; Medical Library Association; Partners in Health; Partnerships in Health Information; Public Library of Science; Royal College of Midwives; Royal College of Nursing; Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists; The Joanna Briggs Institute; THET; and Wikimedia Canada.
The HIFA community interacts on five discussion forums: HIFA, CHIFA, HIFA-Portuguese, HIFA-French, and HIFA-Zambia. HIFA forums are hosted on the Dgroups platform.
CHIFA (2006-), formerly known as CHILD2015, focuses on child health and rights and has more than 3000 global child health professionals. CHIFA is administered jointly by Global Healthcare Information Network, International Child Health Group (Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health), and International Society for Social Paediatrics and Child Health.
HIFA-French (2010-) is a collaboration between the World Health Organization and Global Healthcare Information Network. The forum was originally called HIFA-EVIPNet-French and had a focus on the information needs of policy makers for health in francophone Africa, in association with the Evidence-Informed Policy Network at the World Health Organization. In 2015, the forum expanded its remit to become HIFA-French, in association with the Health Service Delivery department of WHO.
In November 2009, the Global Healthcare Information Network and ePORTUGUESe (World Health Organization) launched a Portuguese version of HIFA. HIFA–Portuguese has more than 2000 members in the eight Portuguese-speaking countries (Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe, Timor-Leste), which have a combined population of 240 million people.
In May 2011, HIFA-Zambia was launched in collaboration with the Zambia UK Health Workforce Alliance.
HIFA addresses the health information needs of the full range of stakeholders, including:
In June 2010, the Positive Practice Environments Campaign, hosted at the International Council of Nurses in Geneva, officially incorporated the HIFA2015 Fact Sheet: Meeting the information needs of health professionals into their campaign materials to empower health workers worldwide to deliver evidence-informed health services to the global population.
In May 2011, the British Medical Association hosted the first international HIFA Conference. Virginia Barbour, Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Medicine, said, "It is a shameful fact that in 2011 people are still dying because their healthcare workers don’t have access to the information they need."
From January to September 2011, HIFA underwent an external evaluation funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, which concluded: “HIFA2015 achieves an extraordinary level of activity on minimal resources from which many people around the world benefit".
In the summer of 2012, the European Association of Science Editors (EASE) formally became a new HIFA Supporting Organization. EASE supports the global initiative by advising authors to make abstracts of their papers highly informative, reliable, and easily understandable (see EASE Guidelines for Authors and Translators of Scientific Articles).
Funding
HIFA is currently supported (2016) by financial contributions from: