Strengthen the evidence-support system

The evidence-support system is the set of structures and processes designed to ensure that policymakers and other decision-makers (including ‘everyday’ citizens) get the research evidence they need when they need it, including how the insights vary by groups and contexts and what confidence and caveats can be ascribed to these insights. In measuring its performance by whether the needs of decision-makers, advisors and implementers are met, the evidence-support system differs from, but intersects with, the research system (where performance is typically measured by peer-reviewed grants and publications) and the innovation system (where performance is often measured by patents and licensing revenue).

The evidence-support system includes three components:

  1. structures and processes on the evidence-demand side to:
    1. incorporate evidence into advisory and decision-making processes and into learning and improvement platforms (enablers)
    2. build and sustain an evidence culture
    3. strengthen capacity for evidence use
  2. ‘interface’ mechanisms supported by what we call ‘evidence intermediaries,’ which includes:
    1. evidence-demand prioritization mechanism (elicitation of questions and horizon scanning)
    2. request mechanism
    3. evidence-supply coordination mechanism, which can take the form of ultra-rapid evidence support (as provided by the ESN-CA evidence-synthesis hub) or a ‘general contractor’ model (as provided by the ESN-CA secretariat)
    4. response-packaging mechanism
  3. supply of evidence, which comes via:
    1. timely demand-driven evidence-support units (the evidence ‘trades’), including those providing data analytics (like ESN-CA’s data analytics hub), modeling, evaluation, behavioural and implementation research (like ESN-CA’s besci hub), qualitative insights (like ESN-CA’s qualitative insights hub), evidence synthesis (like ESN-CA’s evidence-synthesis hub), technology assessments / cost-effectiveness analysis, and guidance
    2. global evidence architecture (e.g., global public goods like living evidence syntheses that are produced once and used many times).

Research funders can support many of these structures and processes.

In the Forum’s role as secretariat to the Global Commission on Evidence to Address Societal Challenges, we developed an approach to conducting a rapid evidence-support system assessment (RESSA), including:

We used the approach in a pan-Canadian assessment – at federal and provincial levels and across sectors – and in a ‘deep dive’ in one federal government department.

We concluded that Canada is a long way away from having a high-performing evidence-support system, particularly with component 1 and with how the three components work together.

In 2024, the McMaster Health Forum prepared a set of evidence briefs, and convened a series of stakeholder dialogues, about strengthening the pan-Canadian health evidence-support system (pCHESS). The pCHESS capstone dialogue in the series provided an opportunity to consolidate thinking and identify actionable insights. We encourage you to read the evidence brief and dialogue summary.

Sadly, little happened as a result of this intensive engagement process. Indeed, as we note in the ‘Learn about us’ section, the pan-Canadian health evidence-support system has arguably become weaker and more fragmented over the last two years, even while the global evidence architecture is being systematically strengthened and its contributors are accelerating their work within a collective-impact approach and even while other countries are taking steps to strengthen their domestic evidence-support systems.

We encourage you to learn more about the six communities that can or do play essential roles in the evidence-support system, as well as how these communities can come together in the form of a learning health system, to provide misinformation support, and to safely and responsibly begin to use AI for policy.

We also encourage you to read up on evidence-support systems and their complements – the global evidence architecture and efforts to put evidence at the centre of everyday life – in several landmark publications:

The consensus statement addresses the features of an approach to reliably deliver research evidence to those who need it. It has been translated into eight languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish) and co-published in the journals of five leading evidence networks (Campbell, Cochrane, Collaboration for Environmental Evidence, Guidelines International Network, and JBI).