Season’s greetings

We wish you a restful holiday season and a healthy 2024.

As we approach the end of the year, we’ve taken some time to look back and reflect on the past 12 months. Our agility, collaborative spirit and impact orientation have enabled us to continue supporting the use of evidence in decision-making, and to engage citizens and stakeholders on pressing societal challenges. Among the projects that have kept us busy, these are a few highlights:

• we launched the Global Evidence Commission’s Update 2023 in six languages, organized a series of events, and worked with the Implementation Council’s 70+ organizational partners, citizen leaders and other stakeholders around the world to help strengthen domestic-evidence support systems, enhance the global evidence architecture, and engaged citizens, citizen leaders and citizen-serving non-governmental organizations in putting evidence at the centre of everyday life
• we developed a nano course on enabling rapid-learning health systems and offered it virtually many times with citizen leader Maureen Smith and research leader Rob Reid from the Institute for Better Health at Trillium Health Partners
• we upgraded the search functionality across four of our sites (McMaster Health Forum, RISE, Evidence Commission, and COVID-END) to improve the user experience and we introduced significant enhancements and new search functionality features in Health Systems Evidence and Social Systems Evidence, such as ability to search for ‘best’ syntheses only, and to identify ‘living’ evidence syntheses, and we launched Social Systems Evidence in Chinese
• we overhauled the design of our products addressing high-profile health- and social-system issues, to better meet the needs of policymakers and other stakeholders who request and/or make use of our products, all of which are publicly available and easily findable on our products page
• we collaborated with other organizations to develop and maintain a suite of living evidence syntheses about COVID-19 public health and social measures
• we published rapid responses to start a series of rapid evidence profiles on topics involving military personnel and Veterans, and developed a list of resources specific to military and Veterans
• we continued to support Ontario Health Teams through RISE, particularly helping them transition to a population-health management approach and put in place the eight OHT building blocks
• we continued to host citizen panels and stakeholder dialogues on topics such as addressing the global health human resources crisis, addressing the politics of the health human resources crisis in Canada, and planning now for the future of technology-enabled healthcare work in Ontario
• we renewed the Forum’s designation as the PAHO/WHO Collaborating Centre for Evidence-Informed Policy for another four-year term, and we renewed memoranda of understanding with the Monash Sustainable Development Institute (Monash University, Australia), University of Antioquia (Colombia) and the University of Gondar (Ethiopia).

Thanks to all of our partners and funders. We have been able to move as far and as fast as we have – both in our work under the Forum banner and in our work as secretariat for the Global Evidence Commission, COVID-END and RISE – because of our partnerships with groups that powerfully complement the Forum’s areas of strength.

These achievements were also made possible by the dedication and perseverance of our talented McMaster Health Forum team of staff, students, collaborators and advisors during another year of extraordinary growth.  

We look forward to continuing our work to support health and social systems, and those supporting evidence-informed policymaking, in Ontario, across Canada, and around the globe.

- McMaster Health Forum team