Department of Social and Behavioral Science, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Room 601, 677 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA, 02115, USA.
, Newton, MA, USA.
J Behav Med. 2019 Feb;42(1):84-94. doi: 10.1007/s10865-018-9979-7. Epub 2019 Mar 1.
Behavioral medicine has made significant contributions to our understanding of how to prevent disease and improve health. However, social and environmental factors continue to have a major influence on health in ways that will be difficult to combat on a population level without concerted efforts to scale interventions and translate the evidence into public health policies. Now is also the right time to increase our efforts to produce policy relevant research and partnerships that will maximize the chances that our evidence is taken to scale in ways that can influence population health broadly, and perhaps contribute to the reduction of the recalcitrant health disparities that plague virtually every area of behavioral medicine focus. As a field we must take an active role in policy translation, learning from the public policy and political science disciplines, and our own pioneers in policy translation. This article discusses importance of accelerating evidence translation to policy, and suggests several factors that could enhance our translation efforts, including embracing policy translation as a key goal in behavioral medicine, increasing our understanding in variability of evidence-based policy adoption across and within states, improving our understanding of how to most effectively communicate our findings to policy makers, conducting research that is responsive to policy makers' needs, and considering the important role of local policy partnerships.
行为医学在帮助我们理解如何预防疾病和增进健康方面做出了重大贡献。然而,社会和环境因素仍然对健康有重大影响,如果不在人口层面上齐心协力地扩大干预措施的规模,并将证据转化为公共卫生政策,那么这些影响将难以克服。现在也是加大力度开展与政策相关的研究和建立伙伴关系的好时机,这将最大限度地提高我们的证据被广泛应用于人口健康的机会,并可能有助于减少几乎困扰行为医学各个领域的顽固健康差距。作为一个领域,我们必须在政策转化中发挥积极作用,从公共政策和政治学学科以及我们自己的政策转化先驱那里吸取经验。本文讨论了加速证据向政策转化的重要性,并提出了一些可以增强我们的转化工作的因素,包括将政策转化作为行为医学的一个关键目标,加深对证据为基础的政策在各州之间和内部的采用多样性的理解,提高我们向决策者有效传达研究结果的能力,开展回应决策者需求的研究,并考虑当地政策伙伴关系的重要作用。