The Institute’s Scope of Work
- Bridging and Brokering – to contribute to improving the health of the public by developing creative ways to bridge the gap between scientific research, practitioners and policymakers and brokering opportunities for mutual support.
- Analysis – to provide useful and reliable knowledge for health policy and problem solving based on both the translation of scholarly work and periodic assessments of health trends throughout the state.
- Design and Development – to develop effective strategies for the design, communication and dissemination of viable policy solutions and to build the collaboration necessary to make those solutions more effective.
- Education and Communication – to equip the next generation of health policy leaders with the skills necessary to use scholarly inquiry and to inform research questions with policy knowledge.
More Efficient Use of Research Assets: “Bridge and Broker”
Having a centralized mechanism for translating research findings and disseminating them to potential users saves each research project the expense of creating its own capacity and learning how to make it work. The Institute is uniquely designed to perform this “bridging” function.
Moreover, when policy issues arise or practical problems become known, instead of relying on haphazard contacts to draw the attention of researchers, the Institute is ideally suited to “brokering” requests to those best able to meet them. As noted, the bridging and brokering can work in both directions. Research findings can also be brokered to potential users, and bridges can be built and maintained between health policy action and academic study.
