To foster country capacity in using the best available evidence in policy-making, Estonia hosted the first WHO Evidence-Informed Policy Network (EVIPNet) Europe country capacity building workshop, 18–20 December 2013, in Tallinn, Estonia. This was organized by the WHO Country Office, Estonia, in collaboration with the WHO Regional Office for Europe and WHO headquarters.
The workshop aimed to:
- raise participants’ awareness about the tools and resources available to health system policy-makers and stakeholders to support their use of research evidence;
- enhance participants’ skills in acquiring, assessing, adapting and applying research evidence;
- teach participants the fundamentals of how to prepare evidence briefs for policy; and
- identify what participants’ own units/departments and their organizations as a whole can do to better support the use of research evidence in health system policy-making in Estonia.
At the end of the workshop participants had a greater understanding of and exposure to evidence-informed policy-making in general, and EVIPNet’s objectives, structure, functions and tools in particular; and enhanced skills in knowledge translation.
Having organized the first EVIPNet Europe country capacity building workshop, Estonia has become a pioneer in promoting the network and its knowledge transfer activities throughout the country and the WHO European Region
Participants
The workshop was attended by policy-makers (senior programme managers; health systems managers; health information managers) from different ministries and related agencies as well as researchers from academic/research institutes, and WHO representatives.
Facilitators
The workshop was guided and facilitated by:
- Tomas Pantoja, Assistant Professor, Department of Family Medicine of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile;
- Ulysses Panisset, Coordinator Research and Knowledge Translation unit and EVIPNet, Knowledge, Ethics and Research Department of the Innovation, Information, Evidence and Research cluster, WHO headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland;
- Tanja Kuchenmüller, Technical Officer, Evidence and Intelligence for Policy-making, Division of Information, Evidence, Research and Innovation, WHO/Europe, Copenhagen, Denmark.
EVIPNet
This WHO-supported Network aims to promote sustainable partnerships at the global, national and regional levels between policy-makers, researchers and civil society to improve evidence-informed policies to strengthen health systems and services in low- and middle-income countries. EVIPNet takes the form of a series of linked, but autonomous country-based and regional networks.
Regional networks have been established in all WHO regions and are supported in terms of technical assistance and regional coordination by the respective Regional Office.
In October 2012, EVIPNet Europe was launched in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The core mandate of EVIPNet Europe is to strengthen and empower country policy-makers, researchers and civil society to use evidence in policy-making and practice. At country level, this will include the establishment of knowledge translation platforms” (KTP), i.e. close, formalized partnerships between these groups.
WHO defines knowledge translation, in the "World Report on Knowledge for Better Health", as the "exchange, synthesis, and effective communication of reliable and relevant research results". The focus is on promoting interaction among the producers and users of research, removing the barriers to research use, and tailoring information to different target audiences so that effective interventions are used more widely.