Public–Private Partnership Health Innovation Lab
Led by Dr Shehla Zaidi.
Our lab examines how commercial and public accountability perspectives can be reconciled to design effective public private partnership (PPP) arrangements for healthcare delivery across diverse national health systems. Although the private health sector plays a substantial role in service provision, PPP approach is government-centric, neglecting the commercial sector’s perspective and behaviour to ideate pragmatic meeting points between the two sectors. Our aim is to understand how converged interests, contextual drivers and health systems entry points can optimise contractual arrangements within mixed public–private health systems. We adopt an interdisciplinary research approach, drawing on governance, business, economics and behavioural sciences, and employ mixed-methods research to build an immersive understanding. Our work spans a wide range of services and stakeholders, including primary care, diagnostics, digital health, and specialised services.
The lab’s work is organised around two core areas:
We investigate how private healthcare providers respond to state-led contractual governance within strategic purchasing arrangements. These may include standalone PPPs designed to supplement public systems, as well as arrangements embedded within national health insurance programmes.
Our aim is to understand how incentives, power and context shape the private sector’s response to engagement with state-driven purchasing initiatives, and how these interactions influence performance, efficiency and risks. We take a multi-level perspective to identify key drivers and mechanisms across different health system interfaces. In parallel, we evaluate performance from the perspective of intended, partially achieved and unintended goals for beneficiaries. Together, we try to build an understanding of how the partnership paradigm can be improved. We apply a range of methods including stakeholder analysis, organisational behaviour, claims analysis, and health services research.
Public-private partnerships are often constrained by limited funding and financial mistrust between public and private actors. Our research explores how existing resources can be more effectively leveraged across sectors within mixed health systems, moving beyond traditional reliance on financial transfers.
We examine how aligned interests between public and private stakeholders can support resource, power and risk sharing in co-ideated PPP arrangements. We apply a market-segmented approach, to analyse variations in motivations of a heterogeneous private market, to inform more purpose-fit and context-appropriate partnership designs.
Additionally, we explore how local health system reforms can serve as entry points for expanding PPPs from binary arrangements to multi-stakeholder collaborations and assess their implications for system-wide alignment and integration. Together, our work seeks to understand whether—and under what conditions—non-monetary PPP models can enhance sustainability, strengthen system integration, and improve health outcomes.
Lead
Associate Professor and Programme Lead for Global Healthcare Management MSc
People
- Dr Lucy Sabin, visiting research fellow
- Victory Olaniyi, research assistant
- Hajar Idrissi, PhD student
- Shatha Alhaddab, PhD student
- Michelangelo Flaborea Mreule, DBA student
- Funke Onamusi, DBA student
- Rose Mbena, DBA student
- Sara Saad, DBA student
Contact: shehla.zaidi@ucl.ac.uk
Find us
We are based at Global Business School for Health, UCL-East, Marshgate campus, 7 Sidings Street, Stratford, London E20 2AE