BACKGROUND Macroeconomic growth in China enables significant progress in health care and public health. It faces difficult choices regarding access, quality and affordability, while dealing with the increasing burden of chronic diseases. Policymakers are pressured to make complex decisions while implementing health strategies. This study shows how this process could be structured and reports th...

The quality of healthcare, particularly as reflected in current practice versus the available evidence, has become a major focus of national health policy discussions. Key components needed to provide quality care include: 1) development of quality indicators and performance measures from specific practice guidelines, 2) better ways to disseminate such guidelines and measures, and 3) developmen...

BACKGROUND Although an evidence-based approach is the ideal model for planning and delivering healthcare, barriers exist to using research evidence to implement and evaluate service change. This paper aims to inform policy implementation and evaluation by understanding the role of research evidence at the local level through implementation of a national chronic conditions management policy. M...

Effectively engaging patients in their care is essential to improve health outcomes, improve satisfaction with the care experience, reduce costs, and even benefit the clinician experience. This chapter will address the topic of patient engagement directly and review the relationships between health literacy and patient engagement. While there are many ways to define patient and family engagemen...

BACKGROUND There is an increasing push for 'evidence-based' decision making in global health policy circles. However, at present there are no agreed upon standards or guidelines for how to evaluate evidence in global health. Recent evaluations of existing evidence frameworks that could serve such a purpose have identified details of program context and project implementation as missing componen...

BACKGROUND Health service reconfigurations are of international interest but remain poorly understood. This article focuses on the use of evidence by senior managerial decision-makers involved in the reconfiguration of stroke services in London 2008-2012. Recent work comparing stroke service reconfiguration in London and Manchester emphasises the ability of senior managerial decision-makers in ...

Global health financing has increased dramatically in recent years, indicative of a rise in health as a foreign policy issue. Several governments have issued specific foreign policy statements on global health and a new term, global health diplomacy, has been coined to describe the processes by which state and non-state actors engage to position health issues more prominently in foreign policy ...

How best to involve the public in local health policy development and decision-making is an ongoing challenge for health systems. In the current literature on this topic, there is discussion of the lack of rigorous evaluations upon which to draw generalizable conclusions about what public participation methods work best and for what kinds of outcomes. We believe that for evaluation research on ...

BACKGROUND Despite the significant role "values" play in decision-making no definition or attributes regarding the concept have been provided in health policy-making. This study aimed to clarify the defining attributes of a concept of value and its irrelevant structures in health policy-making. We anticipate our findings will help reduce the semantic ambiguities associated with the use of "valu...

AIM Literature about research use suggests that certain characteristics or capabilities may make policy agencies more evidence attuned. This study sought to determine policy makers' perceptions of a suite of organisational capabilities identified from the literature as potentially facilitating research uptake in policy decision making. METHOD A literature scan identified eight key organisatio...