Faculty of Health Science leads the way in translational research

What has such appeal to the popular vote that Barack Obama, Tony Blair, and Kevin Rudd all promised to deliver it before they were elected?

What is so hard to deliver that some believe achieving it is as hard as sprouting wings and flying from one planet to another?

The answer is "evidence-based policy", the subject of a world-first book published by Oxford University Press and authored by University Department of Rural Health academic Dr Erica Bell. Research for Health Policy is due for international release largely in America and Europe in October 2009.

"If ‘evidence-based policy’ is a mantra of our age, it is also one of its great unfulfilled promises," says Erica. "The health policy literature suggests that too much policy has been shaped without access to sound evidence. Some feel that this is because policy-makers are from Mars and researchers are from Venus. Others feel it is because we live in an age where policy-making is more about political spin and expediency than truth telling.

"In this book I am exploring another more controversial argument: that the divide between research and policy is about a disconnect between the research methods often taught in universities and the styles of evidence policy-makers need. My argument is not that research should be dumbed down to make it digestible for policy-makers, but rather that research has too often failed to engage with the complexity of policy decision-making."

Research for Health Policy is the first book to describe what translational research for health policy decision-making looks like, offering new research methods that go far beyond traditional classical experimental techniques and standard qualitative methods. It includes research evidence from many disciplines, from the language arts to sociology and political science, economics, social epidemiology, and bio-medicine, never before combined in such a way. It also includes practical tools, hypotheticals, and case studies never before published to offer readers many new and highly original practical approaches for doing better research for policy-makers.

The book also includes extracts from Erica’s interviews with 22 health policy-makers at the most senior level in the health systems of 11 countries. "I asked often hard to access people at the very top of the health sector—surgeon generals, national CEOs—to describe the research practices they felt would help them make the decisions they make daily. Their answers offer a lively and deeply thought provoking juxtaposition of the scholarly discussion in the book."

Dr Erica Bell is Acting Co-Director and Deputy Director at the University Department of Rural Health. She has over 80 academic and applied publications and presentations across health and education. Prior to her employment in 2004 in rural health she was a policy research manager in the Queensland government leading a diverse multidisciplinary research team.

The book also reflects the University Department of Rural Health’s commitment to upskilling health practitioners as part of its workforce development mission.

"The task of helping health practitioners be active shapers of health policy through encouraging them to produce powerful evidence is a very exciting one," says Erica. "In rural health we struggle with a situation where much of the research evidence is urban-based and homogenous, yet rural communities are scattered and heterogeneous." "The world’s largest health research funding agency—the USA’s National Institutes of Health—has made translational research a priority in their vision of 21st Century research," says Dr Bell. "I think our university’s commitment to community engagement makes it a great place from which we can lead Australia’s translational research agenda. I’m very grateful for the way in which our faculty has supported the work represented in this book."

Erica has three other edited books forthcoming in 2009 and 2010 and she is developing two further book proposals.