The Communication Initiative has published a resource to show the impact of SBC interventions on development outcomes, many of which are health-related:
https://directimpact.comminit.com/
'Why the focus on direct impact data?
A common challenge from policy makers, funders, community members, people directly experiencing development issues, and governments is: Demonstrate your Impact. Prove that what you are doing works. The high quality, highly credible data presented on the cards below is designed to help you answer that question for your social change, behaviour change, community engagement, communication and media for development, strategy formulation, policy engagement and funding initiatives...'
'The impact data presented meets the following high standard for inclusion criteria:
- Positive change or trend in a priority development issue;
- Social change or behaviour change strategy or process;
- Randomized Control Trial or Systematic Review methodology;
- High quality peer review journal published;
- Numeric impact data point;
- Published since 2010.'
COMMENT (NPW): This is a valuable resource. But there is inevitably going to be some degree of confirmation bias here, as studies are only included if they show positive change. The focus on RCTs and systematic reviews makes sense, but systematic reviews (on average) carry more weight than single studies, so it would be helpful to have the studies flagged as RCT or SR. And the quality of the research, whether RCT or systematic review, is also important. A poorly designed RCT or systematic review could be misleading. This is probabbly largely avoided by the criterion to include only high-quality peer reviewed journals. Congratulations to Communications Initiative for this innovation. It would be interesting to do something similar for healthcare information (indeed several of the examples in this collection are relevant to HIFA).
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil AT hifa.org
