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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
Rob Stephenson, BSc, MSc, PhD, Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina, University Square, CB#8120, 123 West Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27514 and Monique M Hennink, BA (Hons), PhD, Department of Social Statistics, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom, 44-02380-597989, Rob_Stephenson@unc.edu.
A gap exists between the dissemination of health research and it’s uptake by policy makers, this often results in research outputs not being used effectively to precipitate policy change. Consequently, operations research, which is often designed to address policy questions, often fails to transfer messages to the policy-making community. Conversely, policy makers are often not aware of the availability of research outputs, or face difficulties in using the outputs of operations research in their current format. Furthermore, the politics involved in policy-making decisions may limit the extent to which research outputs are incorporated into policy development. This research investigates issues of dissemination in the researcher-policymaker interface. Although this gap has been identified, little published work has identified the difficulties or investigated strategies for effective communication across the divide. This research explores current modes of dissemination, and identifies the difficulties with these modes and highlights examples of effective dissemination. The outcome of this research will be the development of a protocol for the effective dissemination of reproductive health research to policy makers. This is a multi-country study, conducted in Pakistan, India, Malawi and Tanzania. In-depth interviews were conducted with policy makers and reproductive health researchers. The paper defines the gap between research outputs and their uptake by reproductive health policy makers, and describes some of the barriers experienced in the dissemination of research outputs. The paper also highlights examples of good practice and suggests strategies for improving the dissemination of research outputs to reproductive health policy makers.
Learning Objectives:
Keywords: Communication, Reproductive Health
Related Web page: www.socstats.soton.ac.uk/choices/
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.