16

November

2021

Building on lessons learned from COVID-19 evidence-informed decision making in WHO European Region

Tuesday, 16 November 2021, 9:00-12:00 CET

Policy-makers across all over Europe and Central Asia have faced unprecedented challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rapidly emerging evidence, high degrees of uncertainty, significant political pressure, as well as conflicting positions and opinions, and lacking trust in science made it difficult to make timely and responsive decisions and issue policy recommendations based on the best available evidence. 

Despite these challenges, countries in the WHO European Region have also demonstrated good examples and new opportunities of utilizing and repurposing knowledge translation approaches and platforms, and  leveraged new partnerships and collaborations to support the use of evidence in policy processes.

This regional focus event will reflect on such good practice examples from countries and
organizations in the WHO European Region, exploring the mechanisms and processes that
supported the translation of evidence into policy and practice during the pandemic.

The session furthermore aims at identifying new opportunities for collaboration and ways forward to strengthen agile knowledge translation mechanism for effective policy decisions and recommendations.

Key questions and session highlights: 

This regional focus event we will discuss these key questions:​​

• What have countries of the WHO European Region learnt about evidence-informed decision-making processes during the pandemic? What are the opportunities, obstacles and challenges that policy-makers from the Region have faced and learnt from?
• How can the research-to-policy interface and collaboration across the WHO European Region be further expanded to contribute to better decision-making and increased trust in science? What partnerships are needed and how can they be facilitated?
• Which specific evidence-informed decision-making processes and mechanisms have countries relied on to facilitate evidence use in decision-making during COVID-19 response? Which steps should be taken at national and regional levels to further strengthen and institutionalize these?