Stretton Health Equity Seminar

Conflict of interest and the commercial determinants of health: Opportunities and challenges for effective health governance

Jeff Collin is Professor of Global Health Policy at the University of Edinburgh, where his research centres on the regulation of unhealthy commodity industries and their engagement in health governance. This seeks to develop strategies for managing conflict of interest and promoting policy coherence to address the commercial determinants of health.

He is a co-investigator in the SPECTRUM research consortium funded by the UK Prevention Research Partnership, leading its work programme on governance for health equity. He has longstanding experience in global health research collaborations across diverse contexts, including work on examining implementation of Article 5.3 of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in Africa and South Asia. Research collaborations in Australia have included contributions to ARC projects on regulating ultra-processed food in Australia, Thailand and Fiji, and a current Linkage project examining the roles of NGOs in regulating the alcohol and food industries at national and international levels.

Jeff’s work with international organisations includes developing approaches to managing conflict of interest in nutrition and alcohol policy with WHO, and he has worked extensively with civil society organisations including NCD Alliance, Global Alcohol Policy Alliance, the Healthy Caribbean Coalition, FARE and the Obesity Policy Coalition.

Julia Anaf is a Research Fellow at Stretton Health Equity in the Stretton Institute at the University of Adelaide. Her research interests are the social, political, and commercial determinants of health and health equity. Her particular focus is on the commercial determinants of health (CDoH), or the systems, practices, and pathways by which commercial actors drive health and equity. She contributed to setting a research agenda on the health impacts of large transnational corporations which act as CDoH, conducting health impact assessments of individual transnational corporations operating in Australia, spanning fast food, extractives, and alcohol industries.

She is currently employed on an NHMRC Investigator Grant 'Restoring the Fair Go: which policies and practices are likely to reverse growing health inequities post Covid-19?' A key focus of her research is on the health impacts of privatisation and outsourcing of service delivery and policy-related roles in Australia to large global consultancy and accounting firms.