SUPPORT Tools for evidence-informed health Policymaking (STP) 17: Dealing with insufficient research evidence
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SUPPORT Tools for evidence-informed health Policymaking (STP) 17: Dealing with insufficient research evidence Andrew D Oxman*1, John N Lavis2, Atle Fretheim3 and Simon Lewin4 Address: 1Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services, P.O. Box 7004, St. Olavs plass, N-0130 Oslo, Norway, 2Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis, Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and Department of Political Science, McMaster University, 1200 Main St. West, HSC-2D3, Hamilton, ON, Canada, L8N 3Z5, 3Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services, P.O. Box 7004, St. Olavs plass, N-0130 Oslo, Norway; Section for International Health, Institute of General Practice and Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, Norway and 4Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services, P.O. Box 7004, St. Olavs plass, N-0130 Oslo, Norway; Health Systems Research Unit, Medical Research Council of South Africa Email: Andrew D Oxman* - [email protected]; John N Lavis - [email protected]; Atle Fretheim - [email protected]; Simon Lewin - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 16 December 2009
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Health Research Policy and Systems 2009, 7(Suppl 1):S17
doi:10.1186/1478-4505-7-S1-S17
This article is available from: http://www.health-policy-systems.com/content/7/S1/S17 © 2009 Oxman et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract 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. In this article, we address the issue of decision making in situations in which there is insufficient evidence at hand. Policymakers often have insufficient evidence to know with certainty what the impacts of a health policy or programme option will be, but they must still make decisions. We suggest four questions that can be considered when there may be insufficient evidence to be confident about the impacts of implementing an option. These are: 1. Is there a systematic review of the impacts of the option? 2. Has inconclusive evidence been misinterpreted as evidence of no effect? 3. Is it possible to be confident about a
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