BEIRUT: For Lebanon’s policymakers and media outlets, a new center aims to help channel scientific evidence and understanding toward the benefit of the Lebanese public. The Knowledge to Policy Center (K2P), based within the Faculty of Health Sciences at the American University of Beirut, officially launched Thursday.
At its opening, policymakers, ministerial representatives and faculty from departments across AUB held a lively panel discussion in front of a packed auditorium.
K2P aims to couple evidence from scientific studies with context-specific expertise.
Products include: policy briefs, media bites and evidence summaries, all designed to translate evidence into an easily digestible format for policymakers and those working in media.
Fadi al-Jardali, the center’s director, has high hopes for K2P, which has already been in operation for the past two years.
“We have a new way of thinking about how we make decisions and implement policy,” he said, adding that he is looking for an effective relationship to bloom between the center and Lebanon’s policymakers.
K2P can help governmental actors make decisions that will positively benefit the public, “by making sure that high quality evidence and tacit knowledge are becoming an integral input into the policymaking process,” Jardali said.
He explained that tacit knowledge is the combination of experience and expertise of those working on the ground.
While such information may not reach the pages of a published scientific article, Jardali said that tapping into tacit knowledge is just as essential for informed policymaking, which is why K2P aims to leverage information from both scientific studies and context-specific expertise to improve decision-making in Lebanon.
On a similar note, Health Ministry Director General Walid Ammar, who spoke at the launch ceremony, told The Daily Star that the value of K2P lies in its ability to harness the wisdom of those working on the ground, not just in its ability to synthesize scientific studies.
According to Ammar, implementing policy must not only draw on such studies but must also recognize Lebanon’s needs and those of the various stakeholders involved. “When you decide to make a policy, you should know what the action and reaction of different sectors will be,” Ammar said, adding that K2P has an important role in encouraging interaction between researchers and policymakers.
Atef Majdalani, head of Parliament’s Public Health, Labor and Social Affairs Committee, said evidence is a much-needed component of policymaking in Lebanon and that he expects the relationship between policymakers and K2P research “will be a very useful collaboration.”
Currently, products on the K2P website cover issues relating to mental health, Syrian refugee health access, water fluoridation, universal health coverage and food safety. Jardali expects to have six to seven additional items on the website in the coming month.
Policymakers can request rapid response briefings or more detailed reports, depending on time constraints. Jardali said that K2P is not currently charging for services, as the International Development Research Council in Canada will fund the center’s activity through the next two years.
K2P’s initiative is similar to the Canada-based McMaster University Health Forum, whose director, John Lavis, spoke at the launch ceremony. He explained that K2P’s time-based responses to the needs of policymakers follow in step with similar centers around the world. Lavis pointed out that centers such as K2P offer an invaluable service in providing in-depth, easy to understand briefs, not only for those in governmental positions of power but also for the media.
“One of the things that is unique in what [K2P] is doing is how attentive they are to journalists. Many health decisions are technical and they don’t necessarily get a lot of uptake ... [K2P] realized that in Lebanon you need to make sure you are equipping journalists with high quality evidence so they can ask tough questions of people in power,” Lavis said.
Among its services, the K2P center will offer issue-specific reports to provide the media with quick access to evidence, but Jardali explained that he also plans to hold capacity-building sessions to train journalists to better report health and science stories. Workshops will teach participants to access evidence and identify the most reliable databases.
In recent research analyzing the content of local newspaper articles for journalists’ use of evidence in health reporting, Jardali found that, “The majority [75 percent] of articles detailed health-related events and did not use evidence, while only a quarter were informative articles that relied on the use of evidence.”
Jardali said that be believes the low reliance on evidence in local health reporting runs contrary to the media’s obligation to educate the public on issues that could drastically impact decision making.
“We need to learn when we hear a journalist and the best way to learn is to make sure those people tap into a credible, valid, reliable, high quality source that can give the evidence in a transparent way,” he said.
Through interviews that K2P has already held with journalists, one of the biggest obstacles identified was the unwillingness of media outlets to subscribe to scientific research databases. Jardali warned that lack of access to studies is detrimental to the quality of health reporting.
“If you want to inform and shape policies ... this is not a luxury. This is something that is instrumental and essential if you want to have evidence-based health reporting.”
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