Look back at 2025

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 in addressing societal challenges. Among the projects that have kept us busy, these are a few highlights:

  • in our role as secretariat for the Global Evidence Commission: 
    • we launched the Global Evidence Commission’s Update 2025 (its final update) in seven languages and worked with the Implementation Council’s 95 organizational partners, citizen leaders and other stakeholders around the world to help strengthen domestic-evidence support systems, enhance the global evidence architecture, and engage citizen leaders and citizen-serving non-governmental organizations in putting evidence at the centre of everyday life
    • we promoted the ‘SHOW ME the evidence’ consensus, which outlines an approach to reliably deliver research evidence to those who need it
    • we celebrated what the Global Evidence Commission achieved over the past five years and passed the baton to others working to improve the use of evidence to address societal challenges
  • we helped – along with many other organizations from around to world – to support the development of the Evidence Synthesis Infrastructure Collaborative (ESIC), a community of communities committed to a collective-impact approach to learning from others to improve lives
  • we launched the Evidence synthesis hub of the Evidence Support Network for Canada (ESN-CA), which has an initial focus on informing responses to emerging health threats such as mpox and avian influenza, and areas that require continued planning and responses to health emergencies
  • we continued to support Ontario Health Teams through RISE, particularly helping them continue to transition to a population-health management approach and now to support primary-care access and attachment we continued to publish a range of products addressing high-profile health- and social-system issues (all of which are publicly available and easily findable on our products page), including:
  • we hosted several virtual nano courses on enabling rapid-learning health systems with citizen leader Maureen Smith and research leader Rob Reid from the Institute for Better Health at Trillium Health Partners
  • we expanded our engagement of citizens as partners in evidence syntheses, formalizing our McMaster Forum Citizen Panel for Evidence Synthesis
  • we continued to host citizen panels and stakeholder dialogues on topics such as building capacity in Ontario’s long-term care sector to safeguard residents’ well-being during infectious disease outbreaks.

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 and RISE, and our new role as evidence-synthesis network hub for the Evidence Support Network for Canada (ESN-CA) – 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.