The utilisation of health research in policy-making: Concepts, examples and methods of assessment

The importance of health research utilisation in policy-making, and of understanding the mechanisms involved, is increasingly recognised. Recent reports calling for more resources to improve health in developing countries, and global pressures for accountability, draw greater attention to research-informed policy-making. Key utilisation issues have been described for at least twenty years, but the growing focus on health research systems creates additional dimensions. The utilisation of health research in policy-making should contribute to policies that may eventually lead to desired outcomes, including health gains. In this article, exploration of these issues is combined with a review of various forms of policy-making. When this is linked to analysis of different types of health research, it assists in building a comprehensive account of the diverse meanings of research utilisation. Previous studies report methods and conceptual frameworks that have been applied, if with varying degrees of success, to record utilisation in policy-making. These studies reveal various examples of research impact within a general picture of underutilisation. Factors potentially enhancing utilisation can be identified by exploration of: priority setting; activities of the health research system at the interface between research and policy-making; and the role of the recipients, or 'receptors', of health research. An interfaces and receptors model provides a framework for analysis. Recommendations about possible methods for assessing health research utilisation follow identification of the purposes of such assessments. Our conclusion is that research utilisation can be better understood, and enhanced, by developing assessment methods informed by conceptual analysis and review of previous studies

Ways of assessing the economic value or impact of research: is it a step too far for nursing research?

To identify lessons that could be applied to nursing research, this paper draws on some reviews of the increasing, although apparently still relatively small, number of studies that attempt to assess economic impacts from health research. One review describes several important steps, including identifying the health and other outcomes from specific bodies of research and then valuing the outcomes. We describe major studies in fields such as cardiovascular research that show how the economic value of health research can be demonstrated. In addition, we examine various nursing studies, including ones showing the benefits (especially economic) from nursing itself (as opposed to from nursing research), and also studies describing economic evaluations of new devices and techniques used by nurses, which have the potential to be used when trying to value the research. Currently, such studies rarely go on and demonstrate how the nursing research has had a wider impact on nursing policies and practice, and hence led to outcomes that could be valued. There is, nevertheless, scope to build on these existing nursing studies. Conducting impact assessments could potentially result in a portfolio of examples of nursing research that have informed policies and practices and led to economic impacts in terms of cost savings, and possibly also in terms of health gains that could be value