2023 CAMPAIGN:
EVIDENCE AND GLOBAL HEALTH EQUITY
#WorldEBHCday
The 2022 campaign aims to examine partnerships for practical considerations around establishing different types of partnerships, accelerating innovation, striving for equity and integrity, overcoming challenges and biases, lessons learned and achieving impact for improved health outcomes globally.
We call on the global evidence community to share their experiences and collective wisdom around the formation, development, maintenance, evaluation and outcomes of partnerships in evidence-based healthcare:
The global evidence community has long recognised that collaboration is key to producing trustworthy, pragmatic evidence. The global COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of evidence-based healthcare and the need for partnerships in developing rapid evidence-informed responses, streamlining global efforts, reducing research waste, and ensuring the best-available evidence is accessible, transparent and understood.
The scale of national and international collaboration triggered by COVID-19 has surpassed all historical precedents. While many partnerships pre-existed the pandemic, there has been an extraordinary increase in new and innovative partnerships and collaboration between regulators, governments, scientists and researchers, healthcare providers, tech giants and consumer groups- many of which were written about in the blogs published for World EBHC Day 2021.
There is also, however, the growing concern, heightened during the pandemic, about making partnerships and collaboration equitable for — and beneficial to — all partners. Although willingness to collaborate has increased, vested interests, bureaucracy, and inability to change remain limiting factors. Around the globe, organizations have set up networks, task forces, and working groups to coordinate efforts and overcome some of these challenges.
World EBHC Day 2022 draws attention to the innovative and collaborative partnership initiatives within and across the global evidence ecosystem. It seeks to raise awareness, stimulate debate, and shine a light on best practice in the science and art of working in partnership to bridge research, policy and practice and realize the potential of EBHC.
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
2020: From evidence to impact
World Evidence-Based Healthcare (EBHC) Day was launched in 2020 with a view to raising awareness of the need for better evidence to inform health policy, practice and decision making to improve health outcomes globally.
In its inaugural year, the World EBHC Day campaign Evidence to Impact asked the global evidence community to reflect and share experiences of using evidence to generate impact in healthcare globally. The stories shared were a powerful reminder of the role we all have in ensuring trustworthy evidence is used to inform decision making. With 35 impact stories published and more than 25 events held across the globe, it was clear that there is an appetite to learn from each other’s collective wisdom as it relates to evidence and impact.
2021: The role of evidence in an infodemic
Building on the collective wisdom of using evidence to generate impact in 2020, the 2021 World EBHC Day campaign focused on the role of evidence in an infodemic. Guided by infodemiologist Gunther Eysenbach’s work on infodemic management, and in support of the World Health Organization’s campaign to manage the COVID-19 infodemic, authors of blogs and hosts of events for World EBHC Day 2021 took on the role of Evidence Ambassadors to promote access to evidence-informed and trustworthy information, while helping to combat misinformation.
The strong emergent theme from the 37 blogs published and 30+ events held on 20 October 2021 was the role and importance of partnership. Evidence Ambassadors highlighted the immense importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and multisectoral action, with examples of building relationships across academic, education, clinical and government sectors; between those who generate reliable, trustworthy evidence and those who have the power and influence to effectively disseminate it, implement it and use it. Stories of cooperation and collaboration between key stakeholders in the evidence ecosystem emerged, including the technology and media industries, to develop multifaceted approaches and pragmatic solutions for infodemic management.
