Ten simple rules for a successful global health roundtable

Qualitative approaches play a critical role in global health research by capturing the social, political, and contextual dimensions that shape health outcomes. While interviews and focus groups are widely used, these methods are often time‑limited and project‑specific. Global health roundtables offer a complementary approach, providing a flexible and long-term platform for engaging diverse stakeholders-including researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and community representatives-in collective dialogue, knowledge exchange, and collaboration. When designed well, roundtables can support co‑production of knowledge, address complex system‑level challenges, and generate insights with relevance beyond a single event. Despite their growing use, practical guidance on how to design and run roundtables specifically for global health remains limited. In this article, we present ten simple rules for organising successful global health roundtables, drawing on existing literature, practice‑based experience, and examples from different geopolitical and health‑system contexts. The rules address key stages of the roundtable lifecycle, including topic selection, objective setting, inclusive participation, management of power dynamics, optimisation of engagement and commitment, ethical recognition of contributions, and translation of dialogue into meaningful outputs and sustained collaboration. Together, these rules provide an accessible framework to support researchers, practitioners, and policy actors in using roundtables as ethical, inclusive, and impactful tools for global health research, policy development, and practice.