Call for Proposals – 2021

Call for Proposals

The 14th Global Health Supply Chain Virtual Summit (GHSCS) will focus on Building for the Future: Review, Recovery, and Refocusing. When we hosted GHSCS2020, we had hoped for our next conference that much the world would have begun a return to normality and we could meet in person. Alas, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage across the globe. While several countries are beginning to recover, many are still at early phases of their vaccination campaigns and equitable access to vaccines remains a challenge. Global Health Supply Chains have been under tremendous stress to address the burden of COVID-19 while continuing to meet routine healthcare delivery needs. More than a year into the pandemic, we feel it is important to take stock of how supply chains have managed to cope with such stress; and discuss strategies that have been developed to address the gaps and vulnerabilities on their journey to recovery, including partnerships, innovations, financing, workforce, and governance models to ensure equitable access to healthcare for all. We would also like to highlight approaches to refocus global health supply chains for the future. Importantly, as we build back our supply chains, we need to ensure that we take a holistic and systems-based approach towards strengthening supply chains for end-to-end service delivery supporting diagnostics, essential medicines, and health care products to address current health issues as well as the growing burden of non-communicable diseases.

GHSCS 2021 will explore these issues through a combination of keynotes, panel discussions, and contributed talks / posters. Like in the past, the conference will assemble a collection of experts that include Government representatives, academics, NGOs, civil society, industry, donor and multilateral representatives to explore these topics. The committee is particularly interested in capturing the voices from the field to learn and share experiences related to managing supply chains during the pandemic and also ideas to prepare for the future.

Submission Guidelines

To be considered for presentation (talk or poster) please upload an extended abstract of about 1500 words to GHSCS2021 portal by August 31, 2021. This abstract should contain the following information:

  1. Complete author information including affiliations, titles, telephone numbers and emails. The individual(s) who would come to present or display at the virtual summit should be clearly indicated;
  2. A description of the work being proposed for presentation (talk or poster) including context, motivation, methodology & work timeline, results and interpretation. As part of the context discussion, we also encourage a statement of how other practitioners may be addressing/have addressed similar challenges in different geographies; presenters of academic papers should include a short literature review;
  3. A brief description of the talk / poster outline and key material being presented should be provided. We strongly encourage applicants to submit presentation slides along with the proposal; preliminary version of the slides is also acceptable when accompanied by a short explanation of expected updates in the final presentation; if you have multiple files, please submit these together as one single pdf file.

Note:

  • Proposals / presentations / posters may be written and delivered in English or French; Simultaneous interpretation will be provided at the conference.
  • Selected proposals for presentations will be scheduled into parallel tracks.
  • All selected posters, with audio recording of the poster presenter, will be available on the GHSCS website for viewing; a smaller subset of selected posters will be featured live during the summit.
  • Accepted presenters will be required to register for the Summit as attendees.

Timeline Summary

  • Submission deadline: August 31, 2021
  • Notification of acceptance: September 30, 2021
  • Virtual Summit: November 9-11, 2021