Knowledge brokering for evidence-based urban health policy: a proposed framework
As urban centers in low- and middle-income countries grow in population, so will the unique health effects and concerns associated with highly populated settings. There are a complex set of linkages between setting and health – specifically the physical environment, the social environment and the considerations that are related to health and social services -- that require a multidisciplinary effort to research and evaluate and transform into effective public policy and practice.
Recently, the Johns Hopkins International Injury Research Unit (JH-IIRU) faculty, including assistant scientist Katharine A. Allen and director, Adnan A. Hyder, published a paper in the World Health Organization’s South-East Asia Journal of Public Health that develops a framework to enable the analysis of the complex evidence-policy interface in urban LMICs settings and advocates for the use of knowledge-brokers ad intermediaries between researchers and policy makers.
The paper outlines the significance of an evidence-policy interface in rapidly changing urban centers in developing countries, then proposes an urban health evidence-policy framework that could potentially be used in such countries before illustrating the framework using a case study on health and road transport in Pakistan.
In order to implement this framework -- which would bring together multiple considerations such as the types of evidence used; stakeholder engagement; and the multi-dimensional aspect of health and the urban environment into an interactive network of stakeholder influences that determine evidence-informed urban health policy -- knowledge-brokers are needed to act as translational scientists or intermediaries, effectively linking policy-makers with researchers. Brokers, who would come from public health or social science backgrounds, would be able to navigate the evidence-policy interface and connect scientists and policy-makers in a potential solution to the complexity of policy-making in urban LMICs.
To read the full article and learn more about the proposed framework and use of knowledge brokers, click here.