Paper 1: Demand-driven rapid reviews for health policy and systems decision-making: lessons from Lebanon, Ethiopia, and South Africa on researchers and policymakers’ experiences

Abstract

Background Rapid reviews have emerged as an approach to provide contextualized evidence in a timely and efficient manner. Three rapid review centers were established in Ethiopia, Lebanon, and South Africa through the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, World Health Organization, to stimulate demand, engage policymakers, and produce rapid reviews to support health policy and systems decision-making. This study aimed to assess the experiences of researchers and policymakers engaged in producing and using rapid reviews for health systems strengthening and decisions towards universal health coverage (UHC). Methods Using a case study approach with qualitative research methods, experienced researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with respondents from each center (n = 16). The topics covered included the process and experience of establishing the centers, stimulating demand for rapid reviews, collaborating between researchers and policymakers, and disseminating and using rapid reviews for health policies and interventions and the potential for sustaining and institutionalizing the services. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Results Major themes interacted and contributed to shape the experiences of stakeholders of the rapid review centers, including the following: organizational structural arrangements of the centers, management of their processes as input factors, and the rapid reviews as the immediate policy-relevant outputs. The engagement process and the rapid review products contributed to a final theme of impact of the rapid review centers in relation to the uptake of evidence for policy and systems decision-making. Conclusions The experiences of policymakers and researchers of the rapid review centers determined the uptake of evidence. The findings of this study can inform policymakers, health system managers, and researchers on best practices for demanding, developing and using rapid reviews to support decision- and policymaking, and implementing the universal healthcare coverage agenda.

Rapid reviews for health policy and systems decision-making: more important than ever before

“…The first paper in the series begins with assessing rapid review centers in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs), supported by the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research (HPSR), World Health Organization (WHO), through the Embedded Rapid Review (ERA) initiative [22]. This initiative supported several platforms to conduct rapid reviews for decision-making and included both researcher and decision-maker participants.…”

Rapid reviews methods series: assessing the appropriateness of conducting a rapid review

“…RRs have proven useful in both emergent (eg, COVID-19 pandemic, disaster relief) [10][11][12] and non-emergent yet urgent situations where there is still a need for timely evidence (eg, to inform the development of a new health policy or programme) [13][14][15] or in resource-limited environments (eg, low-income countries). [16][17][18][19] However, there are cases where an RR may not be appropriate. For example, a full SR is likely preferable if the evidence synthesis will be used to make decisions or develop guidelines on a large scale (eg, international, regional), which could have wide-sweeping resource or implementation implications and if time allows to wait for evidence to inform a decision.…”

“…The similarities in the methodologies between RRs and SRs raise the question of when an RR is appropriate to conduct for evidence synthesis. RRs have proven useful in both emergent (eg, COVID-19 pandemic, disaster relief)10–12 and non-emergent yet urgent situations where there is still a need for timely evidence (eg, to inform the development of a new health policy or programme)13–15 or in resource-limited environments (eg, low-income countries) 16–19. However, there are cases where an RR may not be appropriate.…”

Knowledge Translation in the Global South: An Exploratory Mapping of the Literature

“…Increasingly, scholars and practitioners seek to address how knowledge is produced to bring together different ways of knowing (Cook and Brown 1999;Fricker 2007). This applies in equal measure to participatory, communityinformed research that seeks to promote cognitive justice (de Sousa Santos 2018; Chambers 2017) and to scholarship that is embedded within policy mechanisms (Mijumbi-Deve et al 2022).…”