BACKGROUND Evidence-based policies encouraging healthy behaviours are often strongly opposed by well-funded industry groups. As public support is crucial for policy change, public health advocates need to be equipped with strategies to offset the impact of anti-policy messages. In this study, we aimed to investigate the effectiveness of theory-based public health advocacy messages in generating...

The cultural problem described by Morioka (2008) and his concepts of utushi and ma are compared and contrasted to western concepts that convey somewhat overlapping meaning. These include inner critic, underdog voices, identification, projective identification, and organismic valuing process. Morioka's ideas are linked to the work of Rogers, Cooley, Mead, and Lewin. We discuss how utushi and ma ...

Among the many reasons that may limit the adoption of promising reform ideas, policy capacity is the least recognized. The concept itself is not widely understood. Although policy capacity is concerned with the gathering of information and the formulation of options for public action in the initial phases of policy consultation and development, it also touches on all stages of the policy proces...

BACKGROUND Systemic, environmental, and socioeconomic conditions create the context in which community members deal with their health concerns. Comprehensive, community-based chronic disease prevention interventions should address community-wide or regional policy issues that influence lifestyle behaviors associated with chronic diseases. CONTEXT In two communities along the Arizona-Mexico bo...

Policy and decision making should be based on evidence, but translating evidence into policy and practice is often sporadic and slow. It is recognised that the relationship between research and policy uptake is complex and that dissemination of research findings is necessary, but insufficient, for policy uptake. Political, social, and economic context, use of (credible) data and dialogues betwe...

The advocacy debate in ecology and conservation goes back a long way. In the early part of the twentieth century some ecologists were actively pursuing nature conservation, but others eschewed this kind of activism. When the Ecological Society of America (ESA) formed in 1915, a divide already existed regarding the mission of the society and the role of advocacy for preservation of natural areas...

In November 2003, the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network convened a meeting in Montréal of global experts working in the fields of treatments, vaccines, and microbicides. The meeting was historic in that it was the first occasion on which advocates from the three fields had the opportunity to meet and exchange views on policy priorities. In this article, John Godwin provides a summary of the backg...

Modern democracies practice different systems of state-private sector interaction in policymaking. Relevant systems include the neopluralist, also known as pressure group or advocacy pluralism and the neocorporatist, also referred to as liberal or societal corporatism, as well as mixed corporatist-pluralist systems. The Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers introduced by IMF and the World Bank in t...

The reports of the Global Opioid Policy Initiative (GOPI) project to evaluate the availability and accessibility of opioids for the management of cancer pain in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East, together with the previous 2010 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO)/European Association for Palliative Care (EAPC) report from Europe, have provided critical ...

The authors describe how advanced practice nurses in Pennsylvania were able to successfully advocate for nursing-related legislative reforms through Governor Edward G. Rendell's signature health care reform plan (the "Prescription for Pennsylvania"). In addition to discussing advocacy efforts related to a series of nursing-related bills considered by the Pennsylvania Assembly in 2007, the artic...