The Global Health Network views the process of gaining evidence through research as an integral part of health care, or that it should be! This platform and its community of health workers and researchers are working to find better and innovative ways to get outcomes and recommendations from their research implemented into new and better practices and policies.
We are working with several of our partners across disease areas such as malnutrition, maternal health care, Zika infection and many others to explore whether there are resources and tools that can be developed and shared to help research teams do more than publish their findings in journals and present them at conferences. Here we want to find examples of where researchers have developed implementation approaches that they have used with policy makers and health care delivery organisations to take their recommendations and turn them into better treatment guidelines, prescribing practices or prevention measures.
Here we are developing two approaches. One is to work with research networks and organisations to develop an interface where they can upload the summaries of their work, such as:
What did we ask?
What did we learn?
What do we still not know?
What do we recommend?
This information can be shared about single studies and also aggregated for a disease, such as Zika infection, or risk factors for poor outcomes malnutrition, for example.
Our other approach is to determine ways that research teams can take their findings directly back to the communities and their healthcare providers and policy makers to influence change. Here we can take what has worked in settings and diseases and turn these approaches into toolkits and resources. We also hope to identify new ways and implement those through this platform with this community of health researchers and health care workers.