Building a Better Health Research System in Canada: Insights and Actions from the COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic changed health research in Canada. Some of these changes were positive — for example, we completed, shared, and used research quicker than before. However, the pandemic also showed us where Canada’s health research system needs to improve.
We can learn lessons from the pandemic about how to better fund, conduct, and share the findings of health research. In order to identify these lessons learned, we held meetings with members of the public and with key individuals who fund health research, do health research, and decide how to use health research (like policy-makers).
From these discussions, we developed twelve recommendations to improve health research in Canada. Each recommendation includes potential actions that organisations can consider, which are outlined in the full article. We grouped the twelve recommendations into the World Health Organization’s four components of health research systems.
Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.
The first component is Governance/Stewardship (which refers to the management of health research, including processes for creating vision, priorities, ethical standards, and evaluations). Our recommendations include:
1) Include plans for funding, doing, and sharing health research as part of emergency preparedness plans, to be ready for future pandemics.
2) Include equity and inclusion principles in all research processes.
3) Make the processes for grant applications and review more streamlined, inclusive, and rigorous.
4) Create processes and platforms to make sure funders, researchers, and research users can know about, discuss, and align research priorities.
5) Coordinate research activities across local, provincial, national, and international organisations.
The second component is Financing (which refers to finding and distributing money to do health research). Our recommendations includes:
6) Rethink how funding organisations find and distribute money to health researchers.
The third component is Capacity Building (which refers to recruiting researchers, developing researchers’ skills, making sure researchers have what they need to do their research). Our recommendations include:
7) Invest in equity, diversity, and anti-racism training for all involved in research.
8) Support researchers’ career development throughout every stage of their career.
9) Support researchers who are early in their career to establish their research careers.
The final component is Producing and using Research (which refers to making sure research is useful and helping research get used). Our recommendations include:
10) Invest in more Indigenous health research and remove barriers to conducting Indigenous health research.
11) Encourage and create methods to generate novel research.
12) Support researchers to share their findings with policy-makers, and help policy-makers use research in decision-making.
Read the paper — Royal society of Canada working group on health research system recovery: strengthening Canada’s health research system after the COVID-19 pandemic by Sharon E. Straus, Robyn Beckett, Christine Fahim, Negin Pak, Danielle Kasperavicius, Tammy Clifford, and Bev Holmes.
