From March 18 to 22, 2019 at the National School of Public Health in Rabat (ENSP-Rabat), an international workshop was organized, focusing mainly on the contextualization of the evidence for health policies informed by the evidence. This workshop was attended by Congolese experts from CCSC-ASBL and RIPSEC, Moroccan and Belgian experts. This workshop aimed to build the capacity of participants to communicate the results of research in the form of Policy Briefs to inform policy makers.
During this workshop, the workshop’s teaching team adopted the template developed by the EU-sponsored SURE project for the development of evidence-based policy notes. For the choice of themes, the members of Moroccan and Congolese public health schools were consulted; choices were made among themes that were found in both contexts. Groups of 5 to 6 people were trained around the six themes selected (see next point), with each group having a mix of researchers and officials from the Ministry of Health of the three countries. The approach was very participatory, favoring group work, each supported by an internal coach and regular passages from members of the Rabat teaching team. At the end of the workshop, each group presented their work on the elaboration of an evidence-based policy note.
- Theme
- Surveillance of risk pregnancies management -: case of gestational diabetes
- Role of family medicine and community health in the primary health care quality
- Quality assurance strategies of health care services
- Health promotion among youth and adolescents: sex education or physical activity
- Retention strategy of general practitioners in low and middle income countries
- Strategy for combating multidrug-resistant TB in low and middle income countries
- Steps for drafting political notes
- Clarification of the problem
- Identification of options
- Barriers and enablers of implementation
- Writing the political note
During the first stage, the groups chose a country context and sometimes re-defined the focus of the issue, either to be able to carry out the exercise over the period of the workshop, or to adapt to the context of the chosen country. Thus group 2 refocused the theme on pedagogical approaches to train general practitioners, group 3 on supervision, group 4 on sex education and group 6 on scaling up the strategy to fight against TBC in the DRC.
The group work was very informative on the research process and consensus negotiation that requires the development of a policy note, but also on the sharing of knowledge on the health systems of the DRC, Mauritania and Morocco.
Prof Albert Ntambwe
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