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Strengthening collaboration between policy makers and evidence providers, and facilitating cooperation.

Elizabeth Waters and Rebecca Armstrong.

Cochrane Health Promotion and Public Health Field.
Jimmy Volmink.
South African Cochrane Centre.
Luis Gabriel Cuervo and America Valdés.
Research Promotion and Development, Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization.
Peter Tugwell, Lara Maxwell and Viviane Robinson.
Cochrane Equity Field.

cuervolu doesnotexist@cochrane.org paho.org

Objectives:

• Identify and propose specific actions to strengthen knowledge transfer between public health managers / policy makers, and researchers.
• Propose options to address knowledge gaps and deliver new knowledge in timely and useful fashion.
• Share ideas on how to improve evaluation of the effectiveness of knowledge transfer for public health.

Summary: A range of different scenarios instrumental to knowledge transfer between policy makers and researchers will be illustrated by the convenors (5 minutes per scenario). Participants will divide into groups to deliberate and propose specific actions geared towards addressing each issue (30 minutes). Then these will be presented to the plenary to debate, and to propose means of learning and evaluating these processes (30 minutes).

• Priorities: anticipating knowledge needs (e.g. the pandemic avian flu); what to do for issues that cannot be anticipated (e.g. terrorism, some natural disasters); resources and infrastructure that help build capacity.
• Questions: identifying the specific answerable research questions that address health care priorities. Policy makers' role in prompting their knowledge needs; the role of systematic reviews and proposing ways in which systematic reviews could be helpful to the process.
• Delivery: knowledge packaging: policy makers' needs when it comes to knowledge delivery; researchers' needs on queries raised by policy makers; use of guidelines, public media, and legislation.
• Stewardship and governance: what regulations, controls and checks can facilitate. What can be done from within the health authorities to implement the knowledge transfer processes.
• Resourcing: delivering resources to result in actions; funding research on public health care priority issues.
• Outcomes: networking; learning from developments in other places; opportunities for cooperation; bringing players from different backgrounds to address a problem that affects all in public health; the organizers will collate and share a range of proposals to improve evidence-based policy making and implementation.

Level of knowledge required to attend: advanced in at least one of the following fields:

• policy making; systematic reviewing; research in topics relevant to (public) health and implementation; capacity development for research.