An assessment of health research impact in Iran

Abstract

BackgroundIn recent years, Iran has made significant developments in the field of health sciences. However, the question is whether this considerable increase has affected public health. The research budget has always been negligible and unsustainable in developing countries. Hence, using the Payback Framework, we conducted this study to evaluate the impact of health research in Iran.MethodsBy using a cross-sectional method and two-stage stratified cluster sampling, the projects were randomly selected from six medical universities. A questionnaire was designed according to the Payback Framework and completed by the principle investigators of the randomly selected projects.ResultsThe response rate was 70.4%. Ten point twenty-four percent (10.24%) of the studies had been ordered by a knowledge user organization. The average number of articles published in journals per project was 0.96, and half of the studies had no articles published in Scopus. The results of 12% of the studies had been used in systematic review articles and the same proportion had been utilized in clinical or public health guidelines. The results of 5.3% of the studies had been implemented in the Health Ministry’s policymaking. 62% of the studies were expected to affect health directly, 38% of them had been implemented, and among the latter 60% had achieved the expected results. Concerning the economic impacts, the most common expected impact was the reduction of ‘days of work missed because of illness or disability’ and impact on personal and health system costs. About 36% of these studies had been implemented, and 61% had achieved the expected impact.ConclusionIn most aspects, the status of research impact needs improvement. A comparison of Iran’s ranking of knowledge creation and knowledge impact in the Global Innovation Index confirms these findings. The most important problems identified were, not conducting research based on national needs, and the lack of implementation of research results.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12961-016-0129-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The impact on healthcare, policy and practice from 36 multi-project research programmes: findings from two reviews

“…Further examples of studies of the impact of multi-project programmes have been published since the second review was conducted, with the examples from Bangladesh, Brazil, Ghana and Iran [2–5] illustrating a widening interest in producing evidence of impact. In the Ghanaian example, 20 out of 30 studies were used to contribute to action, and Kok et al again showed that considerable levels of impact could be achieved by adopting an interactive approach; they reported that “ the results of 17 out of 18 user-initiated studies were translated into action ” ([4], p. 1).…”

“…While much of the evidence on the benefits of research came originally from high-income countries, interest in producing such evidence is spreading globally, with examples from Bangladesh [2], Brazil [3], Ghana [4] and Iran [5] published in 2015–2016. Studies typically identify the impacts of health research in one or more of categories such as health policy, clinical practice, health outcomes and the healthcare system.…”

Setting research priorities to achieve long-term health targets in Iran

“…Despite the impressive surge of research publications, various studies have suggested that Iran’s research activities in health are not well aligned with the structure of the country’s disease burden and the health needs of its population [ 7 - 9 ]. These studies propose that a key problem might lie in the absence of a systematic process of health research prioritization that engages both the knowledge producers (ie, researchers) and users (ie, policy makers and members of the wider society) [ 8 ].…”

Evolution of Iran’s health research system over the past 50 years: a narrative review

“…For instance, since 1996, GERD began to be specified in Iran’s annual national budget plan, which has relatively improved transparency in financing and has allowed monitoring the investments in research [ 83 ]. Furthermore, several papers have reported that, in recent years, some major macro-policy documents had set targets for substantial rises in R&D expenditure, although the targets were not eventually met [ 15 , 89 ]. An apparent example of failure was the target of increasing GERD to 2.5% by 2015, whereas the last retrieved GERD was only 0.3% (in 2014) [ 15 ].…”