Theresa Canova Norton
‘An e-mail never made me change the way I do things’, a colleague once said. Implicit in this statement is the idea that passively receiving information alone is unlikely to motivate change. How might this observation inform the way we approach disseminating the best available evidence? This is what we explore in our Evidence & Policy article, ‘Maybe we can turn the tide’: an explanatory mixed-methods study to understand how knowledge brokers mobilise health evidence in low- and middle-income countries’.
Knowledge brokers are intermediaries who provide a potentially vital role galvanising change. Studies of knowledge brokers have mostly taken place in high-income countries, so we know much less about knowledge brokers in LMICs. To help address this gap, a global health focused research team conducted three studies following up with knowledge broker participants of international conferences in 2012, 2013 and 2015. The aim was to identify whether evidence from the conferences was shared with others and led to actions such as changes in health policy and practice, and what factors influenced decisions to share and act on evidence.
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