This paper compiles current evidence on barriers to uptake of research in health policy and practice in low- and middle-income countries using scoping review. A total of 4291 publications were retrieved in the initial search, of which 142 were included as meeting the eligibility criteria. Overall, research uptake for policy-making and practice in low- and middle-income countries was very low. The challenges to research uptake were related to lack of understanding of the local contexts, low political priority, poor stakeholder engagement and partnership, resource and capacity constraints, low system response for accountability and lack of communication and dissemination platforms. Important barriers to research uptake were identified, particularly limited contextual understanding and low participation of key stakeholders and ownership. The authors suggest improved understanding of the local research and policy context and participatory evidence production and dissemination to promote research uptake for policy and practice. Institutions that bridge the chasm between knowledge formation, evidence synthesis and translation are noted to potentially play critical role in this translation process.
Monitoring equity and research policy
The COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and restrictions on movement presented an opportunity to conduct Violence Against Women (VAW) research using remote methods. The authors discuss how they adapted methods, reflect on lessons learned, and make recommendations highlighting key considerations when conducting remote research on a sensitive topic of VAW. An exploratory qualitative study was designed using remote methods with 18 men and 19 women, aged 18 years and older, who lived with their partner or spouse during lockdown in South Africa. Data presented in this paper draws from researchers’ reflections drawn from debriefing sessions during the research process, and from participants’ interview transcripts. Remote recruitment of participants took longer than anticipated, and the authors had to re-advertise the study. The authors could not ensure safety and privacy during interviews. Regardless of all the safety and privacy measures the authors put in place during the research process, some participants had an adult person present in the room during interviews, and the researchers had no control over interruptions. Rapport was difficult to establish without an in-person connection, which limited disclosure about violence experience and perpetration. Given the methodological and ethical challenges which limited disclosure of violence against women remotely, the authors conclude that telephone interviews used in this study impacted on the quality of study data. Therefore, the authors do not recommend violence against women research to be conducted remotely, unless it is essential and participants are already known to the interviewer and trust has been established.
This study aimed to understand how much more demographic health surveys can reveal about Zambia’s progress in reducing inequalities in under-five mortality rates and reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health intervention coverage, using four nationally-representative Zambia Demographic Health Surveys, comparing wealth quintiles, urban‐rural residence and provinces, and further using multi-tier measures including wealth deciles and double disaggregation between wealth and region. Comparing measures of inequalities over time, disaggregation with multiple socio-economic and geographic stratifiers was often valuable and provided additional insights compared to conventional measures. Wealth quintiles were sufficient in revealing mortality inequalities compared to deciles, but comparing composite coverage indices by deciles provided more nuance by showing that the poorest 10% were left behind by 2018. Examining wealth in only urban areas helped reveal closing gaps in under-five mortality and composite coverage indices between the poorest and richest quintiles. Though challenged by lower precision, wealth gaps appeared to close in every province for both mortality and composite coverage indices. Still, inequalities remained higher in provinces with worse outcomes. Multi-tier equity measures provided similarly plausible and precise estimates as conventional measures for most comparisons, except mortality among some wealth deciles, and wealth tertiles by province. This suggests that related research could readily use these multi-tier measures to gain deeper insights on inequality patterns for both health coverage and impact indicators, given sufficient samples.
Through sustainable development goals 3 and 8 and other policies, countries have committed to protect and promote workers’ health by reducing the work-related burden of disease. However, while injuries are well monitored, the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimate that only 363 283 (19%) of 1 879 890 work-related deaths globally in 2016 were due to injuries, whereas 1 516 607 (81%) deaths were due to diseases. To address this gap, the authors present a new global indicator: mortality rate from diseases attributable to selected occupational risk factors, by disease, risk factor, sex and age group. The authors outline the policy rationale of the indicator, describe its data sources and methods of calculation, and report and analyse the official indicator for 183 countries. They also provide examples of the use of the indicator in national workers’ health monitoring systems and highlight the indicator’s strengths and limitations.
The four countries in this mixed-methods observational and desk review study were selected based on their variability in COVID-19 response and representation of Francophone and Anglophone countries. The research documented best practices, gaps, and innovations in surveillance at the national, sub-national, health facilities, and community levels, and these learnings were synthesized across the countries. As the pandemic progressed, the health systems moved from aggressive testing and contact tracing to detect virus and triage individual contacts into quarantine and confirmed cases, isolation and clinical care. Surveillance, including case definitions, changed from contact tracing of all contacts of confirmed cases to only symptomatic contacts and travellers. All countries reported inadequate staffing, staff capacity gaps and lack of full integration of data sources, and improved surveillance capacity by training health workers and increasing resources for laboratories, but the disease burden was still under-detected, due to limited decentralization of surveillance at the subnational level and gaps in genomic and post-mortem surveillance, community level sero-prevalence studies, and in digital technologies to provide more timely and accurate surveillance data. The authors call for investments to enhance surveillance approaches and systems including decentralizing surveillance to the subnational and community levels, strengthening capabilities for genomic surveillance and use of digital technologies, investing in health worker capacity, ensuring data quality and availability and improving ability to transmit surveillance data between and across multiple levels of the health care system.
The authors applied a localisation methodology to analyse the current status of the implementation and monitoring of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 6 and 11.2 in Cairo and Dar es Salaam. It uses comparative, top-down and grounded bottom-up analyses to identify gaps in the existing SDG framework and ultimately proposes a set of evaluation criteria to replace the global indicators with new localised and quantifiable indicators in the two cities. In doing so, it responds to prevalent critiques of SDGs specific to their application in the global South, including difficulties in measuring and monitoring urban conditions, misrepresentation due to the reduction of complex local conditions to abstracted data, and the inadequate capacity of the agenda to consider and assess informal activity. The proposed revisions to targets and indicators for SDG 6.1, 6.2 and 6.b, and SDG 11.2, were discussed with community organisers and residents to bolster their validity, and to negotiate better sustainable-development paradigms policy-makers.
With the onset of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, public health measures such as physical distancing were recommended to reduce transmission of the virus causing the disease. However, the same approach in all areas, regardless of context, may lead to measures being of limited effectiveness and having unforeseen negative consequences, such as loss of livelihoods and food insecurity. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, the authors outline and discuss challenges that are faced by residents of urban informal settlements in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The authors describe how new geospatial data sets can be integrated to provide more detailed information about local constraints on physical distancing and can inform planning of alternative ways to reduce transmission of COVID-19 between people. A case study of Nairobi County, Kenya, is included with mapped outputs which illustrate the intra-urban variation in the feasibility of physical distancing and the expected difficulty for residents of many informal settlement areas. These examples demonstrate the potential of new geospatial data sets to provide insights and support to policy-making for public health measures, including COVID-19.
In August 2022, a group of female scholars wrote ‘Why four scientists spent a year saying no’: an article about what they had gained by saying no to 100 work-related requests over the course of year. That led the authors, four female professors, to form the No Club. Over the past decade, the authors have researched work that doesn’t help to advance careers — an attempt to understand why they, along with many others, were doing so much of it. They gave this work a name: non-promotable tasks (NPTs). Studies show that women, regardless of occupation, take on the bulk of NPTs. So, what can organizations do? The authors argue that women are more likely than men to volunteer for an NPT, so asking for volunteers exacerbates the inequity in allocation. Everyone in organizations should be enabled to understand which tasks will move their careers forward (the promotable work) and which ones won’t, and tasks defined as promotable or non-promotable. Knowing where to focus time is argued to help both employees and the organization. If tasks are assigned strategically to take advantage of specialized skill sets, given that an NPT for one position might be promotable for someone at a lower level, the authors propose that tasks be allocated to create equitable portfolios of work and rewards provided for some NPTs.
In this statement the Director of Wellcome Jeremy Farrar reports that two years ago, Wellcome made a commitment to developing anti-racist principles and an anti-racist programme, and to an external evaluation of progress at the institution. An evaluation has now been reported. While it found some progress, such as improvements in the racial diversity of the workforce and some positive behavioural and practice shifts, it reached a clear conclusion that Wellcome continues to fall short of the commitment to anti-racism, both as a funder and as an employer. Farrar accepted and apologised for this and announced two measures to addressing inequity in Wellcome research funding in 2023, including a set of positive action principles applied to funding decision-making processes and the establishment of a dedicated stream of funding available exclusively to researchers who are Black and people of colour, targeted at the career stages where this will have the greatest benefits for diversity.
This consortium did work to understand the benefits and challenges of using a theory of change (ToC) -based approach for monitoring and evaluating the scale-up of health system strengthening interventions. The consortium held annual ToC reflections that entailed multiple participatory methods, including individual scoring exercises, country and consortium-wide group discussions and visualizations, capturing the reflections around an initiative for strengthening district health management teams, to improve health workforce performance and service delivery at scale. The annual ToC reflections proved valuable in gaining a nuanced understanding of how change did happen and strategizing on actions to further steer the scale-up the intervention. It also led to adaptations of the ToC over time. Based on the experience the authors suggest that ToC-based approaches are useful, should include a variety of stakeholders and require their continued commitment to reflection and learning on intervention implementation and scale-up. ToC-based approaches can help in adapting interventions as well as scale-up processes to be in tune with contextual changes and stakeholders involved, to potentially increase chances for successful scale-up.