This article is part of a series written for people responsible for making decisions about health policies and programmes and for those who support these decision makers.Policy briefs are a relatively new approach to packaging research evidence for policymakers. The first step in a policy brief is to prioritise a policy issue. Once an issue is prioritised, the focus then turns to mobilising the full range of research evidence relevant to the various features of the issue. Drawing on available systematic reviews makes the process of mobilising evidence feasible in a way that would not otherwise be possible if individual relevant studies had to be identified and synthesised for every feature of the issue under consideration. In this article, we suggest questions that can be used to guide those preparing and using policy briefs to support evidence-informed policymaking. These are: 1. Does the policy brief address a high-priority issue and describe the relevant context of the issue being addressed? 2. Does the policy brief describe the problem, costs and consequences of options to address the problem, and the key implementation considerations? 3. Does the policy brief employ systematic and transparent methods to identify, select, and assess synthesised research evidence? 4. Does the policy brief take quality, local applicability, and equity considerations into account when discussing the synthesised research evidence? 5. Does the policy brief employ a graded-entry format? 6. Was the policy brief reviewed for both scientific quality and system relevance?
The International Health Regulations (IHR) 2005, as the overarching instrument for global health security, are designed to prevent and cope with major international public health threats. But poor implementation in countries hampers their effectiveness. In the wake of a number of major international health crises, such as the 2014 Ebola and 2016 Zika outbreaks, and the findings of a number of high-level assessments of the global response to these crises, it has become clear that there is a need for more joined-up thinking between health system strengthening activities and health security efforts for prevention, alert and response. WHO is working directly with its Member States to promote this approach, more specifically around how to better embed the IHR (2005) core capacities into the main health system functions. This paper looks at how and where the intersections between the IHR and the health system can be best leveraged towards developing greater health system resilience. This merging of approaches is a key component in pursuit of Universal Health Coverage and strengthened global health security as two mutually reinforcing agendas.
This volume assesses the impact of European Union (EU) policy and law on Member States' health systems and their governance in a number of key areas. In so doing, it builds on two earlier books 1 that sought to assess the changing legal and policy dynamics for health care in the wake of the European Court of Justice's (ECJ) seminal rulings in the Kohll and Decker cases. 2 These books showed that, despite widely held views to the contrary, national health care systems in the EU were not as shielded from the infl uence of EU law as originally thought. 3 The explicit stipulations of Article 152 EC (as amended by the Amsterdam Treaty) that health is an area of specifi c Member State competence, and implicit understanding of the subsidiarity principle where policy is undertaken at the lowest level appropriate to its effective implementation, proved not to be the 'guarantees' of no EU interference in national health care services that they were often held to be. As the raft of legal cases and degree of academic attention that followed have shown, Kohll and Decker were certainly not the 'one-offs' many policy-makers hoped they would be. 4 In fact,
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