Rapid reviews to strengthen health policy and systems:a practical guide

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION: Governments worldwide increasingly recognize the need for knowledge synthesis to inform health policymaking and health systems decision-making in routine, as well as emergency contexts. Rapid reviews are an efficient solution to support health policy and systems decision-making by providing high-quality evidence in a timely and cost-effective manner. Rapid reviews are also increasingly recognized as an optimal approach to generate the necessary contextualized knowledge relevant to different health systems settings, thus promoting their applicability for decision-making. Rapid reviews often stem directly from requests by end-users, including policymakers and health system decision-makers. This demand-driven feature also contributes to their usability to strengthen local health systems and respond to pressing policy decisions. Furthermore, there is increasing experience globally in establishing “rapid response services”, whereby researchers respond to queries from policy-makers or health systems managers through rapid evidence products. This is a promising avenue to support evidence-informed policy-making globally. Yet, there is a paucity of guidance on the conduct, contextualization, and use of rapid reviews, particularly in relation to complex health policy and systems evidence. There is also a need for capacity strengthening in low- and middle-income countries in the field of evidence synthesis and rapid reviews more specifically. OBJECTIVE: Rapid Reviews to Strengthen Health Policy and Systems a Practical Guide aims to address this gap by providing guidance on how to conduct rapid reviews and support their use to inform health policy and systems decisions. The guide also aims to provide practical recommendations on the conduct of rapid reviews to facilitate their use in decision-making. At the same time, key challenges in fast-tracking knowledge synthesis processes and applying them to complex issues pertaining to health policy-making and health system strengthening are described. This Practical Guide was developed as a global public good of relevance to both the research and policy communities. I anticipate it will provide useful guidance to support knowledge synthesis and evidence-informed policy and decision-making worldwide.