From 15-17 November 2021, the WHO Global Evidence-to-Policy (E2P) Summit convened experts in health, policy, and knowledge translation from across the world to determine the current state of evidence-informed decision-making, identify lessons learned at the evidence-policy-society interface during the pandemic, advance the institutionalization of evidence-informed decision-making, and strengthen multisectoral collaboration at country, regional and global levels.
Science has always been key to ensure safe and effective health policies and for improving healthcare programmes. The global COVID-19 health crisis has revealed additional deficits and differences in countries’ capacity to generate and translate reliable evidence into tangible health policy, and clearly emphasized the need to institutionalize evidence-informed decision-making further.
The Summit was organized by the World Health Organization’s Evidence-informed Policy Network (EVIPNet), a global leader in empowering countries to put actionable evidence in the hands of users. With over a decade of successful knowledge translation initiatives in more than 50 countries, EVIPNet supports member countries in working towards safe and cost-effective health interventions through systematic use of the best-available evidence and participatory decision-making processes.
More than 3200 people from 138 countries registered to participate in the Summit, and some 2’500 participants joined one or several sessions of the three-day virtual event. Amongst the keynote speakers were Dr Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, Dr Soumya Swaminathan, lead of WHO’s Science Division, Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Health Ministers from the WHO regions, as well as representatives of a wide circle of renowned national and international academic institutions, among them McMaster University, Canada, Agha Khan University, Pakistan, London School of Hygiene Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom, University Gadjah Mada, Indonesia, University of Hong Kong, Harvard Law School, United States of America, and London School of Economics, United Kingdom.
In their speeches and welcome notes, the speakers underlined that the global health community cannot wait for another crisis to put evidence-to-policy (E2P) mechanisms in place. Adapting latest global evidence to a wide variety of different geographical, political, social, and epidemiological contexts proved a major challenge during the pandemic. In many countries, the COVID-19 health crisis also revealed insufficient evidence-to-policy capacity and knowledge translation mechanisms, such as interdisciplinary advisory bodies.
The WHO Global E2P Summit particularly focused on innovative strategies to sustainably embed knowledge translation and evidence-to-policy mechanisms, allowing countries to routinely find, assess and use the best available evidence for policy and practice at local level. Learning from the pandemic and taking stock of evidence standards and knowledge brokering strategies currently offer great momentum to further invest into evidence-informed decision-making.
To effectively help decision-makers mobilize the best-available and context-relevant evidence, producers, users and brokers of decision-relevant evidence need to collaborate actively across sectors, disciplines, and evidence workstreams. Novel knowledge translation tools that proved useful during the pandemic, such as living evidence syntheses and guidelines, online stakeholder dialogues, or social media communication formats, have the potential to convene sectors and actors of the evidence ecosystem. Producing evidence for decision-making also requires more attention to stakeholder needs and use case scenarios, so that evidence products can be better tailored to user’s needs.
Public trust in the accuracy and relevance of evidence, as well as its systematic translation into safe and effective policy were another major topic discussed at the Summit. In many countries, widespread distrust challenged knowledge translation and collaboration during the pandemic, hindering the use of evidence in both policy processes and public discourse. Summit participants called for more transparent and systematic communication of key evidence and relating policy-decisions, as well as for increased capacity building and education on health topics.
The Summit also hosted five regional events by the WHO Regional Offices for Africa, the Americas, the Eastern Mediterranean, Europe, and South-East Asia. Each regional focus event was organized in close collaboration with EVIPNet secretariats in WHO Regional Offices, and featured a series of case studies on responding to regional specificities of the pandemic with evidence-informed decision-making.
The Summit culminated in the launch of the draft EVIPNet Call for Action and the planned launch of a new partner coalition for sustainable evidence-policy-society-systems. The Call for Action and planned coalition received wide encouragement and support from global partners, multi-sectoral stakeholders and EVIPNet members. Existing EVIPNet country teams and partner organizations will provide additional support taking the Call for Action forward.
> Revisit the Summit’s topics, video recordings, and illustration on the Summit website