TY - JOUR AU - Marchal, Bruno AU - Van Belle, Sara AU - De Brouwere, Vincent AU - Witter, Sophie PY - 2013 DA - 2013/11/08 TI - Studying complex interventions: reflections from the FEMHealth project on evaluating fee exemption policies in West Africa and Morocco JO - BMC Health Services Research SP - 469 VL - 13 IS - 1 AB - The importance of complexity in health care policy-making and interventions, as well as research and evaluation is now widely acknowledged, but conceptual confusion reigns and few applications of complexity concepts in research design have been published. Taking user fee exemption policies as an entry point, we explore the methodological consequences of 'complexity’ for health policy research and evaluation. We first discuss the difference between simple, complicated and complex and introduce key concepts of complex adaptive systems theory. We then apply these to fee exemption policies. SN - 1472-6963 UR - https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-13-469 DO - 10.1186/1472-6963-13-469 ID - Marchal2013 ER -