The research, led by Barbara Whelan and Declan Devane at the University of Galway together with colleagues at the Health Research Board, the Department of Health and McMaster University in Canada, employed a method known as a rapid evidence support system assessment, or RESSA. The approach is designed to give governments a structured diagnostic of their own evidence infrastructure, something remarkably few administrations have ever done systematically. Rather than evaluating a single policy or a single report, a RESSA examines the system as a whole: who asks for evidence, who produces it, and how well the two sides connect. The Irish team triangulated two complementary data streams to build this picture, combining an analysis of published policy documents with in-depth conversations with the people who work inside the system every day.

The documentary component was substantial in its own right. The researchers reviewed fifty policy documents published between 2018 and 2024, a period that encompassed not only routine health policy development but also the extraordinary pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic. Alongside this, they conducted nineteen semi-structured interviews involving twenty stakeholders drawn from across the ecosystem: officials within the Department of Health, staff at national agencies such as the Health Information and Quality Authority, representatives of research bodies including the Economic and Social Research Institute and the Health Research Board, and evidence intermediaries whose job is to translate academic findings into policy-relevant formats. All interviews were anonymised, informed consent was obtained, and the study received ethical approval from the University of Galway Research Ethics Committee.

The headline finding is one of cautious optimism. Across both the documents and the interviews, policymakers and evidence providers alike expressed a genuine commitment to the use of research evidence in health decisions. This is not a trivial observation; in many jurisdictions, evidence-informed policymaking remains an aspiration rather than a shared norm. In Ireland, that commitment is anchored in concrete structures. The country has formal evidence providers, an established practice of health technology assessment, and defined pathways for particular categories of decisions, such as the evaluation of population screening programmes. These mechanisms give evidence a recognised, institutional foothold in the policy process rather than leaving its use to chance or individual preference.

Yet the assessment also revealed significant unevenness. Analytical capacity within the system varies considerably, and much of the day-to-day use of evidence still depends on informal networks, the professional relationships and personal contacts that allow an official to find the right expert quickly. On the supply side, the picture is similarly mixed. Dedicated research, evaluation and analytics units within the Department of Health play a central role in generating and interpreting evidence, but the processes for requesting and commissioning evidence from external sources vary widely from case to case. Quality-assurance standards, meanwhile, are inconsistent, meaning that the rigour applied to one piece of policy evidence may bear little resemblance to the rigour applied to another.

The interface between research and policy emerged as perhaps the most revealing domain of the assessment. Personal relationships proved to be the connective tissue of the Irish system, enabling remarkably rapid evidence use when it mattered most, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the National Public Health Emergency Team and its advisory structures required swift synthesis of fast-emerging research. That speed, however, came with a hidden cost. Because so much coordination is ad hoc and person-dependent, the system is vulnerable to staff turnover: when a key individual moves on, the informal channels that carried evidence into decisions can quietly collapse. A resilient system, the authors argue, should not depend on who happens to know whom.

To address these vulnerabilities, the study identifies a series of practical opportunities for strengthening Ireland’s evidence-support infrastructure. Among the most prominent is the creation of a central evidence repository, a single, findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable store of policy-relevant research that officials can consult rather than reconstructing the evidence base from scratch for each new question. The authors also recommend more consistent quality standards for evidence products, expanded capacity for modelling and evidence synthesis, improved access to and linkage of health data, and the establishment of dedicated knowledge-broker roles whose explicit function is to bridge the worlds of research and policy. Rapid-response services for urgent evidence needs would formalise the kind of emergency capability that proved so valuable during the pandemic.

The study’s conclusions are carefully framed. Ireland, the authors write, already possesses many of the building blocks of a strong evidence-support system: dedicated evidence units, valued partnerships between government and research organisations, and a clear policy commitment to evidence use. What is missing is integration. These components operate as fragments rather than as a coherent, end-to-end infrastructure, and the recommendations are intended to knit them into something more coordinated, transparent and systematic. The team is equally candid that structural reform alone will not suffice; realising the vision depends on leadership, resourcing, and the political and cultural conditions that ultimately determine how evidence is valued and used within government.

The assessment is notable not only for its findings but for its methodological honesty. The authors acknowledge that the study assessed a system in which its own funder, the Health Research Board, and several of its authors are embedded, with some team members employed by the organisations under examination and some serving as interview participants. To limit the influence of these overlapping interests, the team followed a published protocol that fixed the aims, scope and methods in advance, applied predefined inclusion criteria and a structured extraction framework to the document review, and discussed their position relative to the system in a dedicated reflexivity statement. The funder, they state, had no role in determining the findings or recommendations beyond the contributions of its employees as members of the research team.

For an international audience, the significance of the work extends well beyond Ireland’s borders. Evidence-support systems exist in every government, yet they are rarely mapped, and even more rarely subjected to systematic assessment. The RESSA framework offers other countries a template for holding up a mirror to their own arrangements, asking whether evidence flows to decision-makers through dependable channels or through luck and goodwill. As governments worldwide grapple with pandemics, ageing populations and constrained budgets, the Irish study makes a compelling case that the infrastructure connecting research to policy deserves the same scrutiny as the policies themselves, because the quality of a nation’s decisions can never exceed the quality of the evidence system that informs them.

Subject of Research: Rapid assessment of the evidence-support system for health policymaking in Ireland

Article Title: Strengthening the evidence-support system for health policymaking in Ireland: a rapid evidence support system assessment

Article References: Whelan, B., Tierney, M., Byrne, P., Saif-Ur-Rahman, K. M., Burke, N. N., Maguire, T., Lavis, J. N., Waddell, K., Creely, C., Gill, C., Horgan, M., O’Driscoll, M., O’Leary, F., O’Neill, J., & Devane, D. (2026). Strengthening the evidence-support system for health policymaking in Ireland: a rapid evidence support system assessment. Health Research Policy and Systems. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-026-01539-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12961-026-01539-5

Keywords: evidence-informed policymaking, evidence-support system, RESSA, health policy, Ireland, health technology assessment, knowledge brokering, COVID-19, Department of Health, Health Research Board, evidence synthesis, policy evaluation