Month: October 2023

Exploring evidence use in an Irish health service context

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Susan Calnan

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Experiences and perceptions of evidence use among senior health service decision makers in Ireland: a qualitative study.’

How do senior health service decision makers use evidence to inform their work and decision-making and what types of evidence do they use? What are the potential barriers and facilitators to research use by health service decision makers and are there ways to improve its usage?

We wanted to explore these questions in our qualitative study published in Evidence & Policy, which was conducted in Ireland’s national health service, the Health Service Executive (HSE). Our focus was on senior decision makers working in the organisation’s Healthcare Strategy, Clinical and Operations divisions, where evidence use has the potential to inform the quality and delivery of health services and workforce planning.

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 17 participants between August 2021 and January 2022.

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What knowledge informs policy decisions? And how can we measure it?

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Jonas Videbæk Jørgensen

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Knowledge Utilisation Analysis: measuring the utilisation of knowledge sources in policy decisions.’

Using research-based knowledge to inform policy decisions constitutes a key ambition in most modern democracies. As such, enhancing the utilisation and impact of research has gained widespread attention among scholars and policymakers, with a range of initiatives to promote it. But how often is research-based knowledge used in policy decisions? And what kinds of knowledge have the strongest impact? Despite years of scholarship on the topic, measuring knowledge utilisation remains a significant challenge. In a new Evidence & Policy article, I discuss existing measures of knowledge utilisation and present a new approach called ‘Knowledge Utilisation Analysis’ (KUA).

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