Call for Papers · Thematic Forum · Convened by Dr. Virginia Gunn, Associate Editor

Forum: Health System Restructuring in an Era of Crisis

Manuscript deadline: 31 December 2026

Health Politics invites submissions to a thematic Forum on Health System Restructuring in an Era of Crisis, convened by Dr. Virginia Gunn, Associate Editor (Associate Professor, Cape Breton University, NS, Canada; Director, Research in Medicine, CBMC, Dalhousie University, NS, Canada; & Affiliate Researcher, Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institute, Sweden).

Health systems across the world are being remade under conditions of converging crisis: pandemic aftershocks, fiscal austerity, climate emergency, geopolitical instability, and democratic erosion. These pressures are rarely neutral. They reorganize who holds authority over health systems, whose interests reform serves, and how the costs and benefits of restructuring are distributed. This Forum asks contributors to treat restructuring not as a technical or managerial process alone but as a political one, shaped by power, institutions, and the actors who contest the direction of reform.

Consistent with the journal's scope, we are most interested in work that foregrounds power and justice rather than health outcomes alone. We welcome contributions from political science, political economy, political sociology, law, and public health, at national, comparative, and global levels of analysis.

Topics may include, but are not limited to

Framing and drivers

• • The politics of post-pandemic health system reform
• • Health system resilience as a contested political concept

The political economy of restructuring

• • Austerity-driven restructuring and its distributional consequences
• • Privatization, marketization, and re-publicization debates
• • Comparative reform trajectories across welfare state regimes
• • International organizations and financial institutions as architects of crisis-era reform

Technology and data

• • Artificial intelligence and advanced technologies: clinical labor, automation, and governance
• • Data infrastructures, platform actors, and the commercialization of health information

The health workforce

• • Deprofessionalization, task-shifting, and contested authority over the health workforce amid shortages
• • Equity, diversity, and inclusion policies for the health workforce
• • Health workers as political actors: unions, mobilization, and resistance to restructuring

Global and cross-border mobility

• • Health worker migration and brain drain: who funds the workforce and who reaps its benefits
• • Medical tourism, cross-border patient mobility, and the global political economy of care

We encourage methodological rigor and a plurality of approaches, including quantitative, comparative, and mixed-methods designs alongside qualitative and institutional analysis. Work that develops power as an analytical category, rather than invoking it descriptively, is particularly welcome.

Submission details

• • Article types, word limits, and formatting (APA 7th edition) follow the journal's standard author guidelines.
• • Submit via submit.hpolitics.org, indicating "Forum: Health System Restructuring" in your cover letter.
• • All submissions undergo double-blind peer review; final editorial decisions rest with the Editors-in-Chief.
• • Health Politics is a Diamond Open Access journal (CC BY 4.0) with no article processing charges.

Manuscript deadline: 31 December 2026  ·  Indicate "Forum: Health System Restructuring" in your cover letter  ·  submit.hpolitics.org