About the SUPPORT-SYSTEMS project
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Exploring how civil society evidence can improve the inclusiveness and accountability of health system decisions, and identifying the practices needed to achieve these goals.
For several decades, strengthening the use of evidence to inform decisions about financing, organizing, and delivering health services has received growing attention from global organizations such as the World Health Organization and national ministries of health. Much of this attention has focused on the use of research evidence-knowledge produced through systematic, transparent, and reproducible methods and published in scientific literature.
An important source of evidence that has received relatively less attention is the use of evidence from civil society actors, who are individuals and groups who engage in public life to express and advance their beliefs and interests. The SUPPORT-SYSTEMS project explores how civil society actors bring evidence to health policy processes, how this evidence is used and its potential to improve inclusiveness and accountability of health systems decisions. The project also aims to identify the practices that need to implemented to achieve these goals.
The project is organized into three work packages with the following outputs:
- Work package 1: A Cochrane qualitative evidence synthesis exploring the use of evidence from civil society in health policy processes. This systematic review of qualitative studies has involved stakeholder input throughout the process, including contributions from members of Health Information for All (HIFA, hifa.org) and the People’s Health Movement–Kenya.
- Work package 2: To explore how policymakers in Ghana and Kenya engage with, value and use different types of evidence, particularly evidence from civil society. Two PhD candidates and one post-doctoral fellow has conducted in-depth studies of national vaccine introduction & rollout (Ghana and Kenya) and sub-national decisions for strengthening primary health care (Ghana).
- Work package 3: Based on insights from WP1 and WP2 and through structured discussions with the project’s advisory board and members of the HIFA forum, the project will develop resources for supporting the sharing and use of evidence from civil society actors