There has been a growing global concern for improving the use of evidence to inform health policy in
recent years. Increasingly there is recognition that individual projects or programmes building evidence
synthesis skills, may be limited in their effect without a broader consideration of the systems in place
which ‘embed’ or ‘institutionalise’ evidence informed policy making practices (Alliance for Health Policy
and Systems Research and WHO 2007).
The GRIP-Health programme is a five-year project supported by the European Research Council which
studies the political nature of health policy to understand how to best improve the use of evidence. This
explicitly political lens enables us to focus on the contested nature of health issues as well as the
institutions that shape the use of evidence in health policy making. We understand institutions as
including both formal structures and rules, as well as informal norms and practices (Lowndes and
Roberts 2013). The GRIP-Health programme follows the World Health Organization’s view that Ministries
of Health remain the ultimate stewards of a nation’s health, and further play a key role in providing
information to guide health decisions (World Health Organization 2000, Alvarez-Rosette, Hawkins, and
Parkhurst 2013). As such, GRIP-Health is particularly concerned with the structures and rules created by
government to gather, synthesise, or otherwise provide evidence to inform policy making.
This working paper is one of a series of six briefs covering a set of countries in which the GRIP-Health
programme is undertaking research. This brief presents an overview of what is termed the ‘Evidence
Advisory System’ (EAS) for health policy making within the country of interest, which is taken to
encompass the key entry points through which research evidence can make its way into relevant health
policy decisions. This can include both formal (government mandated) and informal structures, rules,
and norms in place.
Individual reports in this series can be useful for those considering how to improve evidence use in
specific country settings, while taken together the reports identify the differences that can be seen
across contexts, permitting reflection or comparison across countries about how evidence advisory
systems are structured – including which responsibilities are given to different types of bodies, and how
well evidence advice aligns with decision making authority structures
