Name: Dræbel, Tania Home Country: Denmark Research Country: Guinea-Bissau Project period: 2000-2004 Type: Ph.D. thesis Title Public Health Response in a Complex Political Emergency: the role of  National Health Professionals in conflict and Health Systems change in Guinea-Bissau Abstract The study addresses conflict-related health systems’ dynamics through the prism of national health professionals’ social praxis. The central question of the study pertains to how health professionals’ social praxis contributes to shape the Public Health Response established in the course of the armed conflict, which took place in Guinea-Bissau from May 1998 to June 1999. The central part of the study was conducted from March 2000 to July 2001 in the capital of Bissau and neighbouring region of Biombo. A complementary part of the study takes place in the sub-region of São Domingos, situated Northwest of the capital and bordering Senegal. Combining qualitative and quantitative research methods, the study is composed of four elements, comprising 1. Eighty in-depth interviews with national health professionals; 2. Twenty interviews with national and international actors of the conflict�s Public Health Response; 3. Inventories of physical resources, quality and quantity of medicines of health centres and hospital wards; 4. A questionnaire survey with 442 health professionals working in the public health structures of Bissau. Health professionals’ conflict-related social praxis is uncovered in the light of processes of professionalisation, which in turn, following two parallel, yet communicating corridors of analysis are approached, first as inscribed in larger historical, political, and socio-economic movements and then related to agents’ continuous construction of professional identity through sense-making and social interaction. In this perspective, conflict-related social praxis emerges as a two-dimensional expression of structural mechanisms and singularity of personal trajectories. Illustrating the blurred boundaries between private, public, and professional spheres of experience and action, one pre-occupation of the study pertains to how health professionals balance on the lines delineating professional responsibilities, social and political commitments, and their obligations as heads of households. The study shows how the multiplicity of responsibilities, commitments as well as social trajectories, personal history, interests and goals, which may, not only contradict, but also actually collide with professional interests and motivations, all constitute an intricate net of elements orienting professionals� praxis in one or another of many possible directions during the conflict. Supervisors: Allan Krasnik, Institute of Public Health and Susan Reynolds Whyte, Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen and  Peter Åby, Bandim Health Project Guinea Bissau and  The State Serum Institute