RESEARCH ARTICLE


A Pragmatic Approach to Evidence-Based Public Health Policy



Anton Lager1, *, Jennie Bacchus Hertzman1, Karin Guldbrandsson2
1 Centre for Health Equity Studies (CHESS), Stockholm University/Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
2 Department for Public Health Sciences, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden


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Creative Commons License
Lager et al.; Licensee Bentham Open

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department for Public Health Sciences, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden; Tel: +46703142514; Fax: +468162600; E-mail: anton.lager@chess.su.se


Abstract

The evidence-based approach is a means to improve the quality, safety and cost-effectiveness of the public sec-tor as a whole, not only the health service. But to be successful, the evidence-based approach needs to be restricted to the stage of the policy process where it really can make a contribution; namely in the choice of intervention. In the policy pro-cess phase that precedes the choice of intervention, i.e. the problem formulation phase, there can by definition be no “evi-dence” available, since no controlled trials can ever prove that one problem is bigger than another. Further, the policy pro-cess phase following the choice of intervention, i.e. the implementation phase, is to date still restricted to research of weaker design and the policy makers need to consider input from many different sources also here. A pragmatic approach, focusing the choice of intervention phase of the policy process, has proved successful in the dissemination of an evidence-based policy for parenting support in Sweden.

Keywords: Policy, Evidence, Public Health, Guidelines, Recommendations , GRADE.