Mobilising knowledge

Knowledge mobilisation is about making research knowledge useable and accessible to the people involved in decision making, through working collaboratively.

Commissioners and healthcare managers must base their actions on sound evidence, using strong local intelligence and nationally agreed guidelines to shape excellent service provision. Our research found that this emphasis on evidence-informed decision making can impede progress on ethnic inequalities as often an absence of evidence undermines the confidence of decision-makers to intervene to reduce ethnic inequalities.

The EEiC project also found that an absence of evidence is often assumed and relevant sources are overlooked. Many managers simply do not ask questions about different population sub-groups. Meanwhile, individuals who understand the needs of minority ethnic groups are not always aware of the resources or confident in using them. Research and data must be presented in ways that are informative and impactful.

More effective generation and use of evidence is needed to raise awareness of the scale and nature of ethnic inequalities and to find viable solutions.

The EEiC project has produced a range of resources aimed at supporting more critical and systematic mobilisation of evidence on ethnicity, health and healthcare: