Healthy Public Policy Recommendations: The Infrastructure for Identifying and Difffusing Laws that Improve Health

Clear, specific recommendations for health policy are important, but they are just one link in an “policy evidence translation supply chain.”  Healthy People 2020 recommendations themselves depend upon research evaluating legal interventions. Scientific public health law evaluation has a strong record identifying legal interventions that promote safer environments and behaviors, but not always:  legal “treatments” affecting millions of Americans are often too slow to be evaluated, to diffuse across jurisdictions as they show promise, and to be tweaked into optimal form based on evolving evidence.  Once evidence-based recommendations are made, policy surveillance is needed to track (and help speed) the adoption of recommended policies. Legal technical assistance is often needed to turn good policy ideas into laws or policies suited for a particular jurisdiction.  Support for engaging community stakeholders can be a crucial factor in local adoption and implementation. All of these translation resources – evidence reviews, recommendations, policy surveillance, legal TA, and support for community engagement -- are available to some extent to support knowledge transfer in the United States, but a systematic effort to support this “supply chain” would materially improve the return on the current public and private investment in public health law.