Increasing the use of evidence in policy making means strengthening capacity on both the supply and demand sides of evidence production. However, little experience of strengthening the capacity of policy makers in low- and middle- income countries has been published to date. We describe the experiences of five projects (in Bangladesh, Gambia, India and Nigeria), where collaborative teams of res...

Policy capacity focuses on the managerial and organizational abilities to inform policy decisions with sound research and analysis, and facilitate policy implementation with operational efficiency. It stems from a view of the policy process that is rational and positivistic, in which optimal policy choices can be identified, selected, and implemented with objectivity. By itself, however, policy...

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...

It is difficult to disagree with the general argument that successful health reform requires a significant degree of policy capacity or that all players in the policy game need to move beyond self-interested advocacy. However, an overly broad definition of policy capacity is a problem. More important perhaps, health reform inevitably requires not just policy capacity but political leadership an...

Background There is increasing interest in using systems thinking to tackle ‘wicked’ policy problems in preventive health, but this can be challenging for policy-makers because the literature is amorphous and often highly theoretical. Little is known about how best to support health policy-makers to gain skills in understanding and applying systems thinking for policy action.  <br /...

In this paper, we consider a newsvendor who is going to invest on dedicated or flexible capacity, our goal is to find the optimal investment policy to maximize total profit while the newsvendor faces uncertainty in lead time and demand simultaneously. As highlighted in literature, demand is stochastic, while lead time is constant. However, in reality lead time uncertainty decreases newsvendor's...

BACKGROUND The health sector in Australia faces major challenges that include an ageing population, spiralling health care costs, continuing poor Aboriginal health, and emerging threats to public health. At the same time, the environment for policy-making is becoming increasingly complex. In this context, strong policy capacity - broadly understood as the capacity of government to make "intelli...

the emergence of new general issues and their complexity, has created new areas of thought called good policymaking. in this study based on a mixed consecutive explorational research, and through the feasibility study of applications of good policy making in the executive branch and by using interviews with the cabinet ministers of 10th and 11th iranian governments, the facilitating inter-organ...