Findings of research by Professor Lupton and colleagues with 66 participants:
No participants had yet found any benefit or use for My Health Record. It was viewed more as a repository for the use of healthcare professionals than for women’s own active use as contributors and users of their data.
Source: What do Australian women think of My Health Record? | This Sociological Life
We should therefore reject the myth that policy-making is purely technical, legal or scientific, and can be conducted in a vacuum. Most policy-making has to rely in some way on consultation with citizens to determine what public values should steer policy.
Source: Australia’s public servants: dedicated, highly trained … and elitist
target group of such an online platform would be the health impact assessment (HIA) as well as the environmental assessment communities of environmental impact assessments (EIA) and strategic environmental assessments (SEA)
— Read on www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/environment-and-health/health-impact-assessment/publications/2018/environment-and-health-impact-assessment-developing-an-online-knowledge-sharing-platform-and-network-2017
Some interesting points in this US National Academies report:
Health literacy, cultural competence, and language access services are distinct but inextricably linked concepts for delivering equitable care to all members of the increasingly diverse population of the United States. These concepts are linked, but they developed via different paths, and each has its own unique focus with regard to enabling every individual to obtain the ability to process and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health care decisions.
Our results suggest that between-country variations in inequalities in current mortality can partly be understood from variations in inequalities in smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, and poverty. Also, countries with higher national income, higher quality of government, higher social transfers, higher health care expenditure and more self-expression values have smaller inequalities in mortality.
— Recent paper by Mackenbach and colleagues www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1353829216304543
A guide to monitoring and evaluating policy influence
A useful and, more importantly, comprehensible guide to aligning types evaluation activities with the anticipated mechanisms of policy influence:
There’s also some recognition of the messiness of attribution in the context of policy change, and that even policy actors themselves rarely fully appreciate the forces that determine and shape policy implementation.
This schema is worth revisiting in the context of the typology of HIA, i.e. mandated, decision support, advocacy, and community empowerment, because it may provide an alternate lens for understanding why HIAs gain traction or not.
