Purpose: To help with finding and using research evidence. The focus is on health policy making and these tools are aimed at those responsible for making decisions about health policies and programs (eg., elected officials, civil servants), those who support these decision makers (eg., policy analysts, political staffers, independent advisers) and health system stakeholders (eg., […]

GRADE stands for ‘Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation’. It was developed for health systems interventions. The GRADE approach separates two issues: “the quality of the evidence and the strength of recommendations. Quality of evidence is only one of several factors considered when assessing the strength of recommendations.” The intention of the GRADE approach […]

Purpose: To describe common problems that can occur with grading systems which may negate their usefulness in justifying evidence-based changes in policy and practice. Description: In order to summarise the state of research on particular topics, the quality and robustness of scientific results is often assessed using one of a number of so-called grading instruments […]

Focused dialogue is the collaborative construction of powerful ideas. These ideas are essentially simple, generic and fundamental concepts which, once developed between people, can serve to build the shared understanding essential for effective communication and successful integration. Developing focused dialogue involves a number of discrete steps: 1. Identifying “the terms that will play a key […]

A useful analytical framework for assessing knowledge co-production consists of the following elements: “typology of actor roles, research phases, objectives and forms of actor integration, and types of knowledge” (see figure below). The framework was used to analyse “what types of actors contributed what kind of knowledge in which research phase” in four transdisciplinary studies […]

Purpose: To distinguish among three primary categories of unknowns. Description: One useful way of thinking about different kinds of unknowns is illustrated in the matrix below, which highlights three kinds of unknowns: known unknowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns. The most familiar is what we know we do not know ie ‘known unknowns’ or conscious […]