SUPPORT is an excellent resource providing a variety of information about evidence-based medicine and health policy (for example, a section on making judgments about the quality of evidence, and resources for conducting trials in low-income countries). The home page is here. Also included are tools for evidence-informed health policymaking. These are presented in a new supplement to the open-access journal Health Research Policy & Systems. The series is "for people responsible for making decisions about health policies and programmes and for those who support these decision makers."
The editorial Evidence-informed health policy: are we beginning to get there at last? [pdf] says policy informed by evidence "has long been the hope, and indeed sometimes the expectation, of those reforming health research systems. Now though, there are grounds for believing that the hopes are increasingly beginning to be turned into realities. This optimism is based on factors including... capacity to conduct systematic reviews of that evidence; and the growing attention being given to the policymaking structures necessary to absorb and use research evidence."
This takes me back to methods I studied in graduate school (PhD in Public Policy Analysis), reading classics such as Stokey & Zeckhauser. Always good stuff to know, giving people a methodical way to look at a complex situation. SUPPORT is a respectable summary of how to do this, encouraging people to systematically ask questions such as:
- What's the problem?
- How did the problem come to attention, and has this influenced the prospect of it being addressed?
- What indicators can be used to establish the magnitude of the problem, and measure progress in addressing it?
- How can a problem be framed (or described) in a way that will motivate different groups?
Evidence-informed says it better. I think 'evidence-informed' is a better description of what we are trying to achieve, but it's used far less frequently than 'evidence-based', and that seems unlikely to change. The policy-making information is divided into 18 sections, with topics such as:
- 4: Using research evidence to clarify a problem.
- 8: Deciding how much confidence to place in a systematic review.
- 11: Finding and using evidence about local conditions.
The guide says policymakers "find themselves in situations that spur them on to work out how best to define a problem. These may range from being asked an awkward or challenging question in the legislature, to finding a problem highlighted on the front page of a newspaper. The motivations for policymakers wanting to clarify a problem are diverse. These may range from deciding whether to pay serious attention to a particular problem that others claim is important, to wondering how to convince others to agree that a problem is important. Debates and struggles over how to define a problem are a critically important part of the policymaking process."
Available in other languages? Some of the policy-making documents say "Links to Spanish, Portuguese, French and Chinese translations of this series can be found on the SUPPORT website http://www.support-collaboration.org/" - but I was unable to locate those links.
More graphics needed. There's lots of good advice here, although some of it could be improved. For example, the following table describes how to search for a research article or systematic review -- screen shots of conducting a search would have been preferable.
Additional resources & tools. Links to useful web sites are provided, such as the WHO Evidence-Informed Policy Network and the Candian Cochrane Centre. ResearchtoPolicy.ca talks about a policy decision-making program.
Many thanks for highlighting the SUPPORT Tools for evidence-informed Policy making (STP)! I wanted to mention, for your readers, that the translations of the tools into Spanish, Portuguese, French and Chinese are underway and should be available within the next few months from the weblink mentioned above (www.support-collaboration.org). A downloadable 'book' version of the Tools (i.e. a compilation of all of the papers as a single PDF file) will also be available later this year from the same site.
Simon Lewin (one of the authors)
Posted by: Simon Lewin | Friday, 05 February 2010 at 09:26 AM