the field of cognitive psychology has increasingly provided scientific insights to explore how humans are subject to unconscious sources of evidentiary bias, leading to errors that can affect judgement and decision-making. increasingly these insights are being applied outside the realm of individual decision-making to the collective arena of policy-making as well. a recent editorial in this jou...

This article examines the implicit promises of fairness in evidence based medicine (EBM), namely to avoid discrimination through objective processes, and to distribute effective treatments fairly. The relationship between EBM and vulnerable groups (such as those disadvantaged by virtue of poverty, ethnicity, age, gender, mental health problems or similar) is examined. Several aspects of EBM are...

BACKGROUND Current healthcare systems have extended the evidence-based medicine (EBM) approach to health policy and delivery decisions, such as access-to-care, healthcare funding and health program continuance, through attempts to integrate valid and reliable evidence into the decision making process. These policy decisions have major impacts on society and have high personal and financial cost...

Background Good decision-making requires gathering and using sufficient information. Several knowledge translation platforms have been introduced in Burkina Faso to support evidence-informed decision-making. One of these is the rapid response service for health. This platform aims to provide quick access for policy-makers in Burkina Faso to highquality research evidence about health systems. Th...

The paper aims at addressing the problem of what makes specific aiding to decide within public policy making problem situations. Under such a perspective it analyses some basic concepts such as “public policy”, “deliberation”, “legitimation”, “accountability” and shows the necessity to expand the concept of rationality which is expected to be behind the acceptability of a public policy. We then...

Background There is need to strengthen institutions and mechanisms that can more systematically promote interactions between researchers, policy-makers and other stakeholders who can influence the uptake of research findings. In this article, we report the outcome of a two-way secondment model between Ebonyi State University (EBSU) and Ebonyi State Ministry of Health (ESMoH) in Nigeria as an in...