Manal Etemadi is a Research Fellow in the ARC West’s Health Economics team, with special focus on evaluation of social prescribing link workers in primary care. She has a solid commitment to pro-poor health policy making and has published several peer-reviewed papers in international journals touching on social health protection, pro-poor health financing, and subsidization of the poor using a wide range of methodologies.

Manal holds a PhD in Health Policy from the Iran University of Medical Sciences, Iran. Her PhD research was methodologically innovative, being one of the first studies to use social network analysis to understand how health financing architecture impacts on financing equity. For the past 8 years, she has been deeply involved in the formulating policy briefs and policy documents in Iran Health Insurance Organization in support of the poor’ access to health services and improving equity in health financing. In addition, she has experience of teaching health sociology, social determinants of health, health system governance, health systems financing and health insurance. She worked intensively on addressing aspects of inequality in financial access to health services, monitoring health expenditures and financial protection in Iranian health insurance system.