20 July 2023 - Timely, quality and credible evidence is crucial for health decision-making. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for data and evidence has been on the increase as stakeholders recognize their importance for policy and decision-making. For instance, evidence was needed to support the prevention, clinical diagnosis, treatment and overall management of COVID-19, including safe and efficacious vaccines.
The pandemic offered a unique opportunity for WHO to advance support for evidence generation and use in health policy-making. WHO supports the institutionalization of evidence-informed policy-making and advocates for bringing together, in an integrated manner, all different programmes and technical expertise involved in the generation of data and evidence, to be used complementarily in policy-making processes.
The special edition of Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal (EMHJ) on evidence to policy in health care, published in July 2023 by the Science, Information and Dissemination Department at the Regional Office, offers a collection of exclusive country and regional, as well as global, studies and reports, with lessons learned from different contexts in using data and evidence to address health issues.
The special edition features papers on how data and evidence have been used to inform decision-making in different settings and for different purposes. The studies provide relevant insights and examples on how to tailor the collection or creation of data and evidence to country or community contexts and use them for the development of strategies, national and subnational plans, and public health interventions.
The studies provide examples on the diverse use of evidence and knowledge, which may serve as examples for future interventions and actions. This unique collection conveys the importance and urgency of enhancing institutional capacity for evidence-informed policy-making in the Region to make health systems more resilient.