Better Guidance Is Welcome, but without Blinders
Future Health Systems
Abstract
The three-paper series on guidance for evidence-informed decisions about health systems, published in PLoS Medicine, and produced by members of the World Health Organization (WHO) Task Force on Developing Health Systems Guidance, offers important contributions to improving the quality of evidence-informed decision-making in health systems. We recognize the importance of engendering greater structure and systematization in processes that collate and evaluate evidence, and bring it to bear on policy. However, there are significant challenges in doing this for policies related to health systems, and we caution against the adoption of rigid approaches to the development of guidance and to the application of evidence to policy.