In Nairobi, water rights emerge not through legal recognition alone but through relationships with infrastructurally powerful actors. Residents must engage with specific individuals across institutional levels who control urban water distribution. This explains neighborhood disparities in water access and why some residents secure better supplies than others. The fragmentation of water control challenges traditional legal and normative frameworks of water rights. Understanding how rights are embedded in everyday socio-material relationships is crucial for comprehending how people establish water access and thereby concretize their right to water in practice.

In this Comment, I reflect on my personal experience in doing research at institutional archives as an early career historian. I discuss how my research has been shaped by encounters with physical and digital sources across Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong SAR and the United Kingdom. In doing so, I draw on the concept of ‘interim archives’ to emphasise the partial nature of primary sources in institutional archives, and the necessity for research to be multi-archival due not only to the realities of access, but also the need to incorporate diverse perspectives.

Health technology assessment (HTA) agencies assess evidence to support decision making about which technologies to provide and pay for in the health system. HTA impact is understood as the influence that HTA report findings can have in the health system, including impacts on reimbursement decisions, changes to health outcomes, or broader system or societal impacts. The International Network of Agencies for Health Technology Assessment (INAHTA) is a global network of publicly funded HTA agencies. INAHTA’s mission, in part, is to advance the impact of HTA to support reimbursement decisions and the optimal use of health system resources. Each year, INAHTA awards the David Hailey Award for Best Impact Story to the member agency that shares the best story, as voted by fellow members, about HTA impact. The impact story sharing program in INAHTA contributes to a deeper understanding of what works well (or not so well) in achieving HTA impact. This paper provides six impact stories from agencies that were finalists for the 2021 and 2022 David Hailey Impact Award for Best Impact Story: the Institut national d’excellence en santé et en services sociaux, the Malaysian Health Technology Assessment Section, Ontario Health, the Center for Drug Evaluation, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, and Health Technology Wales. These stories demonstrate that HTA agencies can, in differing ways, effectively support governments in their efforts to place evidence at the centre of decision making.

This perspective article addresses the critical issue of equitable access to sustainable healthcare services for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Despite the increasing prevalence of ASD globally, significant disparities persist in accessing appropriate healthcare services. The lack of comprehensive data on autism prevalence and incidence in many regions further exacerbates this challenge, hindering the development of targeted interventions and equitable resource allocation. This paper sheds light on barriers to equitable access, including geographical disparities, cultural stigma, communication barriers and inadequate training of healthcare providers. Strategies for achieving sustainable solutions are proposed, including the expansion of telehealth services, financial assistance programmes, competency training, community-based support programmes and investment in high-quality research. By addressing these challenges and implementing evidence-based interventions, we can work towards ensuring that all children with autism have access to the healthcare services they need for optimal development and well-being.

In recent years, the movement of personnel from the public sector to interest groups has garnered considerable attention throughout Europe. Consequently, there has been an increased focus on the phenomenon of revolving door lobbyists within academic literature. This research contributes to this scholarly discussion by examining how the employment of such lobbyists facilitates access. We argue that interest groups gain advantages by recruiting individuals from the public sector in policy domains with limited mobilization, but this benefit decreases as more interest groups mobilize. Our analysis of survey data from seven European political systems supports these expectations, indicating that recruiting professionals with experience in the public sector enhances access, especially in policy areas with minimal lobbying activity. This highlights the potential for interest mobilization to counterbalance the advantages of hiring revolving door lobbyists.

In the United Kingdom (UK), racially-minoritised (non-White) people are more likely to have poorer health outcomes and greater difficulties with accessing healthcare (Dyer, 2019). People face individual and societal adversity that can affect their physical and mental wellbeing (Gibbons et al., 2012). There are clear mental health needs for racially-minoritised people, and we must go further in understanding the barriers to help to adequately meet the needs of diverse communities. The aim of this systematic review was to understand the barriers to accessing formal mental health support for racially-minoritised people within the UK. Qualitative empirical studies published between January 1970 to December 2020 were searched for using two databases: PsycINFO and Web of Science. Studies were searched for written in English, using a clinical or non-clinical population of adults with qualitative data collection and analysis methods. Database searches and reference mining gave a total of 283 studies, with 31 duplicates removed. Considering inclusion and exclusion criteria there were 15 final studies. A second researcher (S.O’H.) was used throughout, when selecting papers, quality assessment using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) checklist, coding and developing themes using thematic synthesis. The final four themes are ‘internal and external stigma’, ‘understanding of distress and coping’, ‘competence of professionals and services’ and ‘perception and accessibility’. There are various barriers making it harder for racially-minoritised people to access mental health support. Further research is needed with individual communities and action must be taken by commissioners, services, CBT practitioners, and others to eliminate barriers and improve mental health care.

Archaeologists seek to improve our understanding of the past by studying, preserving, protecting, and sharing nonreplaceable archaeological resources. Archaeological collections hold information that can assist these aims as long as they are properly cared for, identified, and accessible. One of the most serious barriers is the lack of large-scale coordinated efforts to make archaeological collections findable and accessible. This article suggests that developing and implementing the use of a standardized set of attributes regarding collections provides solutions and strategies to find collections. These attributes can connect and standardize existing archaeological collections from a variety of sources (federal and state agencies, CRM firms, Indigenous and descendant communities, and academic departments), serving the profession in multiple ways. Most critically, the baseline data can be synthesized to inform and direct priorities for future fieldwork, thereby decreasing redundancy in archaeological collections and improving curation efforts nationwide. Such efforts would also provide a resource to students and researchers looking to understand and interpret the past at multiple scales by encouraging more collections-based research and less archaeological site destruction. Access for descendant communities will also be improved with information about their cultural heritage. This, in turn, encourages transparency and collaboration between those communities and archaeologists.

Health technology assessment (HTA) programs inform decision making about the value and reimbursement of new and existing health technologies; however, they are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that they are a cost-effective use of finite healthcare resources themselves. The 2023 HTAi Global Policy Forum (GPF) discussed the value and impact of HTA, including how it is assessed and communicated, and how it could be enhanced in the future. This article summarizes the discussions held at the 2023 HTAi GPF, where the challenges and opportunities related to the value and impact of HTA were debated. Core themes and recommendations identified that defining the purpose of value and impact assessment is an essential first step prior to undertaking it, and that it can be done through the use and expansion of existing tools. Further work around aligning HTA programs with underlying societal values is needed to ensure the long-term value and impact of HTA. HTA could also have a role in assessing the efficiency of the wider health system by applying HTA methods or concepts to broader budgetary allocations and organizational aspects of health care. Stakeholders (particularly patients, industry, and clinicians but also payers, wider society, and the media) should ideally be actively engaged when undertaking the value and impact assessment of HTA. More concerted efforts in communicating the role and remit of HTA bodies would also help stakeholders to better understand the value and impact of HTA, which in turn could improve the implementation of HTA recommendations and application to future actions in the lifecycle of technologies.