Promoting implementation of research results into policy and practice

Failure to translate research findings into policy and practice prevents research from achieving maximum public health benefit. Despite substantial investment in clinical research in poverty-related diseases, including emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases and antimicrobial-resistant infections, exploitation and use of results beyond research groups to date remains limited. The barriers to an efficient uptake of research results include limited interaction between researchers, policymakers, patients’ community and other stakeholders, lack of experience in exploiting research results beyond academia, limited health systems capacity, affordability issues, and structural and cultural differences between the realms of research, programme planning and policymaking.

Proposals should address the following activities:

• Carry out registration and/or post-registration studies of health technologies (such as pragmatic effectiveness studies) that address diseases within the scope of GH EDCTP3 to demonstrate the clinical effectiveness in relevant patient populations;
• Demonstrate the cost effectiveness of the health technologies being investigated in relevant communities;
• Identify barriers to uptake of the health technologies being investigated and address them in the studies to be carried out;
• Develop methods and evaluation tools that can ensure translating clinical research results into healthcare policy and practice. These methods should be broadly applicable to improve patients quality of life beyond the specific health technology being investigated;
• Early involvement and regular interaction with policy and decision makers as well as end-users to have the health technology adopted by health systems.

Applicants need to concisely describe any prior research findings and explain how the proposal builds on these results. Building on results from projects supported under previous EDCTP programmes is encouraged.

Proposals should present a sound assessment of the feasibility of the proposed work, especially as regards the planned clinical investigations. Realistic plans for recruiting trial subjects should be presented and corroborated by demonstrated success from previous studies. The proposals should justify the choice of populations to be enrolled into the trials and explain how they relate to the larger population. The full range of relevant determining characteristics (sex, gender, age, socio-economic status, etc.) needs also to be considered.

Proposals should describe how stakeholder views of the proposal’s relevance and the study design have been incorporated in the co-creation process of planning the research proposal. Proposals should indicate explicit plans for good participatory practices for engaging stakeholders at every step of the research life-cycle.

Proposals should provide details on the methodology for linking clinical research aspects with the translation into healthcare practice and policy.

Applicants are welcome to draw on any relevant lessons from knowledge translation in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is essential that proposals bring together clinical researchers with experience in implementation research, health policy experts and end users.