South-East Asia Regional Conference on Epidemiology

Evidence to policy and action through
partnership
Paul Garner
Ensuring that decisions in the health sector are embedded in reliable evidence is important to make
the best use of scarce resources. It helps to make health services effective and efficient, in both what
public health policies and clinical care packages contain and how they are delivered.
In the health sector, we all recognize the gap between what is known to be good practice and what
is actually done. In recent years, there has been a revolution in synthesizing research, and we now
know that we need reliable synthesis to contribute to evidence-informed decision-making. Systematic
reviews are necessary but not sufficient to ensure that evidence translates into policy and practice.
The Effective Health Care Consortium uses systematic reviews to prepare policy- relevant
accessible products for a variety of policy networks. Influencing these policy networks is a central
part of the Consortium’s communication strategy, and during this presentation we take some casestudies
of research to practice and lessons that we have learned about how to do this successfully.
Fig. 1 shows an approach to engaging people in policy networks in evidence. It emphasizes the twoway
relationship between people synthesizing research, the messages they produce, and the policy
networks that use the knowledge in decision-making.
Fig. 1: Increasing evidence-informed decisions in the health sector