Contemporary debate on health care resource management is tied to a central moral issue: how to achieve an optimum level of reasonable or appropriate treatment based on the medical condition of each patient. Failure to tackle and resolve this issue in a confident and forthright manner ensures that the present approach to health care decision-making will continue in a state of indecisiveness if ...

Evidence-based approaches (those explicitly linked to the best available scientific evidence and reflecting community preferences and feasibility) are increasingly used to inform health policy decision making on the burden of a disease attributable to particular causes, interventions and policies that might work to confront those causes, and issues of community fit and feasibility. This paper i...

BACKGROUND Getting research into policy and practice (GRIPP) is a process of going from research evidence to decisions and action. To integrate research findings into the policy making process and to communicate research findings to policymakers is a key challenge world-wide. This paper reports the experiences of a research group in a Nigerian university when seeking to 'do' GRIPP, and the impo...

The Precautionary Principle in its simplest form states: "When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically". This Principle is the basis for European environmental law, and plays an increasing role in developing environmental health policies as w...

BACKGROUND There are few Australian studies showing how research evidence is used to inform the development of public health policy. International research has shown that compensation for injury rehabilitation can have negative impacts on health outcomes. This study examined transport injury compensation policy in the Australian state of Victoria to: determine type and purpose of reference to i...

CONTEXT Advocacy for Recovery has been joined by research offering new perspectives on mental health policy, treatment, rehabilitation and anti-discrimination efforts. OBJECTIVES Chances and challenges of a Recovery model for the mental health field will be presented and discussed. KEY MESSAGES Recovery is currently widely endorsed as a guiding principle of mental health policy. New rules f...