How roundtables can bring researchers and policymakers together

This article was written by Dr Dagmar Ceramidas**, Business Manager for the Academic Unit of General Practice at Australian National University.**

At a full-day training session teaching policymakers and researchers the value of working together, our table was given the task of developing a policy to prevent youths from loitering around shopping centres.

As I listened to the policymakers discuss, plan and arrive at a decision they all agreed with, I quickly realised that I was the only researcher at the table. They all fell silent as I asked why were the youths at the shopping centres in the first place, and what incentive would make the youths do anything differently?

APHCRI: Translating research into policy

The Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute (APHCRI), based at the Australian National University in Canberra, was funded by the Commonwealth Department of Health between 2003 and 2015 — before its funding was re-channeled into the Medical Research Futures Fund (MRFF).

Over those 12 years, APHCRI commissioned hundreds of research projects and, in 2009-10, APHCRI developed its Centres of Research Excellence (CREs) program through which nine CREs were awarded $2.5m each to conduct a rigorous, multi-institutional 4-year research program that would inform policy.

A sound research translation plan was one of the selection criteria on which the applications were judged and selected.

APHCRI determined the overarching research themes for given funding rounds by negotiation with, or at the direct request of, the Government which had an agenda of primary care reform.

Themes aligned to the nation’s primary health care needs and directions over the 12-year period, and clearly, the Government was looking to inform policy through research. However, as is often the case, public servants and researchers often live on different planets.

A two way relationship

APHCRI had an excellent two-way relationship with the upper levels of Government that recognised and valued research evidence. The obvious core element was communication.

Effective policy is the product of genuine engagement between policymakers and respected researchers in which both parties are able to relinquish any sense of superiority and come to the table as equals, having first laid down their weapons.

APHCRI established a number of strategies to maximise the influence and uptake of research findings into policy. These included the establishment of a secondment officer from the Commonwealth Department of Health, Conversations, and APHCRI Roundtables.

The secondment officer was a critical and crucial link between policymaking and research findings. Working half-time in their government offices and half-time at APHCRI premises, the officer kept a finger on the government’s pulse and policy direction.

At the same time, they worked with researchers to learn their language and process, and how to consider research outcomes as essential ingredients in policymaking. It took several months before the officer felt acquainted with researchers and their art.

Starting conversations

When among their government colleagues, the officer promoted and stimulated policymaker interest in APHCRI research and its outcomes, highlighting the importance of research as a basis for effective policymaking.

The officer mobilised policymakers with interests aligned to APHCRI research themes and convened timely APHCRI presentations of research findings, emphasising their importance to Australia’s health policy reform agenda.

These presentations were called Conversations with APHCRI and became a regular event at the Department of Health.

Evaluation of the 2014 Conversations series showed that the strategy increased in relevance and popularity among policymakers as the year progressed. From July onwards, between 83 and 100% of attendees were referring to research when developing policy, whereas earlier in the year, that figure was between 50 and 77%.

Because the Conversations forum was informal and pitched to all policymakers, it became a learning forum for junior and mid-career policymakers who engaged freely with researcher presenters, experiencing first-hand the benefits of a two-way exchange of ideas.

The Conversations audiences usually comprised horizontal level policymakers, so a second forum was developed to attract senior policymakers with a greater influence among Government Ministers. Subsequent to each conversation, the secondment officer also hand-picked the senior-most relevant policymakers to whom they issued invitation-only access to what became APHCRI Roundtables.

How to run a Roundtable

The Roundtables were attended by the Department of Health Section and Branch Heads, Federal Government Ministers and members of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, all people who had vertical influence in the adoption into policy of research findings. A closed-door Roundtable usually followed a Conversation.

Roundtables were of half to full-day duration, depending on the issue under discussion. Pre-reading was issued, and APHCRI worked prior to the Roundtable to determine a series of discussion questions that would provide the answers required by the participants.

One of the APHCRI Centres of Research Excellence focused on primary health care delivery in rural and remote Australia. Some areas of Australia are so remote that the closest health professional could be a plane trip away, or 12-14 hours’ drive. Telemedicine is widely used.

As part of its research outcomes, this Centre developed an improved measure of access to primary healthcare. Because of the importance and relevance of this topic to the Australian government, the government began to request APHCRI to organise Roundtables with the research group so they could remain involved with the research findings.

As a result, the Government changed the way it had been mapping an apportioning health services in rural and remote Australia.

The Roundtable strategy proved so successful that other CREs over time were also invited by the Government to present at Roundtable forums. What APHCRI had worked hard to nurture had taken on a life of its own as the value of the policy maker-research engagement model came to fruition.

The key to engaging government policymakers with researchers was engendering genuine two-way communication. It took the Secondment Officers several months to learn what research was and subsequently how valuable were research findings to effective policymaking, to such a degree that they could convincingly promote the value of research to their policy-making colleagues.

APHCRI’s research translation strategy would have functioned regardless, but the officer was the oil that transformed a potentially grinding machine into a sleek, high-performance model that developed its own momentum and fed Australian primary care policy change. — Dagmar Ceramidas

(Picture credit: UnSplash)