ABOUT HEALTH POLICY AND PLANNING

Health Policy and Planning's aim is to improve the design and implementation of health policies in low- and middle-income countries through providing a forum for publishing high quality research and original ideas, for an audience of policy and public health researchers and practitioners. HPP is published six times a year (bimonthly).

Specific objectives are to:

• Attract high quality research papers, reviews and debates on topics relevant to health policies in low- and middle-income countries;
  
• Ensure wide geographical coverage of papers including coverage of the poorest countries and those in transition;
  
• Encourage and support researchers from low- and middle-income countries to publish in HPP;
  
• Ensure papers reflect a broad range of disciplines, methodologies and topics;
  
• Ensure that papers are clearly explained and accessible to readers from the range of disciplines used to analyse health policies; and
  
• Provide a fair, supportive and high quality peer review process.
  

  Our Instructions to authors have been updated. Authors should pay close attention to the factors that will increase likelihood of acceptance. As well as the high overall quality required for publication in an international journal, authors should address HPP's readership: national and international policy makers, practitioners, academics and general readers with a particular interest in health policy issues and debates. Manuscripts that fail to set out the international debates to which the paper contributes, and to draw out policy lessons and conclusions, are more likely to be rejected, returned to the authors for redrafting prior to being reviewed, or undergo a slower acceptance process. In addition, economists should note that papers accepted for publication in HPP will consider the broad policy implications of an economic analysis rather than focusing primarily on the methodological or theoretical aspects of the study. Public health specialists writing about a specific health problem or service should discuss the relevance of the analysis for the broader health system. Those submitting health policy analyses should draw on relevant bodies of theory in their analysis, or justify why they have not, rather than only presenting a narrative based on empirical data.