Public health evidence

The National Heart Forum's Information Services team has been working to identify published evidence on public health interventions.

We aim to carry out a new survey of the evidence for or against a specific public health intervention once a quarter. The results of each survey will be presented in a matrix format, to allow readers to easily identify evidence which might be relevant to their area of work, as well as the population on which a study has been carried out, and the conclusions drawn.

For each survey we also present a graphical display of the information about articles gathered, allowing you to see quickly which interventions have been the most studied, and which populations are commonly involved in these studies.

Background - why are we doing this?

Research into the information needs of public health professionals, carried out by the National Heart Forum has shown that public health practitioners experience a lack of evidence on the effectiveness of public health interventions. This lack of evidence has implications for how practitioners recommend new policies, and which policies can be implemented.

As an experiment to try and meet this need, the National Heart Forum has devised this "Evidence survey" project. This project is being trialled in 2012, and aims to present one new survey of existing evidence each quarter. We will be promoting this service through our existing eBriefing services and other networks. We are also experimenting with various visual ways of displaying and mapping information about published research. You will see that each evidence survey is accompanied by graphical displays of information showing which interventions or populations have been studied and in which countries research has been carried out.

If you have any comments or questions on this service, or would like to suggest an evidence topic for us to review, please tell us by completing our Contact us form.

Available evidence surveys