Getting health research into policy and practice

The DFID-funded Research Programme Consortia working on sexual and reproductive health, HIV and AIDS are trying to help solve some complicated problems. It’s not just that the drug treatments are new and changing all the time. There are many different potential strategies for preventing infection too, some for babies, some for children, some for adults. In addition to treating the disease – and the other diseases that so often co-infect people with HIV – they are trying to change behaviour and influence policy. A very tall order.

There are many peer-reviewed health journals, but there isn’t such a well-worn route to sharing the lessons that these consortia have learned about that other very tricky area – getting policy into practice. Jo Crichton from the Realising Rights RPC and Sally Theobald of Realising Rights and Addressing the Balance of Burden in AIDS (ABBA) recently co-edited an issue of ID21’s insights to highlight this very thing.

The insights issue focuses on innovative approaches to communicating research on sexual and reproductive health, HIV and AIDS globally. The articles are all based on case studies presented during a meeting at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, in the UK, in May 2009. (See also the briefing paper from that workshop, written by Sally, Jo and Olivia Tulloch from ABBA and Kate Hawkins from Realising Rights.)

Politics influences how open decision-makers are to using evidence-based research in formulating policy or making decisions. For example, in the field of sexual and reproductive health, social or religious attitudes and interest groups play a powerful role in politics and can encourage decision-makers to ignore new research evidence. The role of research in policy processes can also be hampered by weak capacity to assess and use research evidence or a lack of appreciation of how research can identify health problems and unmet needs, develop effective interventions, and improve the accessibility and targeting of services.

Researchers from many different research projects contributed articles to this issue, including Sinead Delany-Moretlwe, Eleanor Hutchinson, Johnny Gyapong, Wambura Mwita, Rose Oronje, Sabina Rashid, Nana Ole Lithur, and Kate Hawkins.

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