Informing Healthy Public Policy

Public health decision makers and the public are exposed to a wide range of research evidence, that can often conflict or be uncertain. The way this evidence is presented, in scientific journals, political debates and in the news, influences how people understand, use, and act on it. We shall explore how information about health is communicated, and what people know and think about issues and policies, to better understand how we can communicate research findings into policy debates. There has also been much debate in recent years about how research evidence can be made more useful and relevant to decision makers. We shall investigate ways in which we can improve the reliability and usefulness of studies that bring together large quantities of complex evidence. Decision makers can also face difficulties with the quality of evidence available to them. Even large-scale evaluations of public health interventions are often inconclusive or hard to apply to real-life decisions. The elements of a more ‘fit for purpose’ approach to evaluation are well known, but rarely combined into a coherent package. These include stakeholder involvement, careful priority setting, research designs that can withstand external shocks, best use of routinely collected data, and the reporting of findings in ways that policy-makers and practitioners can readily apply to their own decisions. We will combine these elements into robust approaches to evaluating public health policies and programmes