Policy Innovation Blog

Increasing evidence demand

Jonathan Shepherd - 04.11.2011

Following last week's announcement of the Alliance for Useful Evidence, Professor Jonathan Shepherd writes a guest blog on how increasing the demand for rigorous evidence will involve capitalising on the instinct of all decision makers.

Debates about useful evidence usually focus on important supply side questions: how to increase evidence production, synthesis, translation into guidelines and implementation. But this is only half the problem. Without addressing demand, supply solutions such as a NICE equivalent for education, and for crime and justice and a better funded Campbell Collaboration, won't achieve much.

Many of the most powerful motivators to demand evidence are manifest locally in public services. Payment by Results is beginning to galvanise third sector organisations such as the Salvation Army who need to invest in the most effective residential drug rehabilitation services. Chief Constables and police commanders are scouring the criminology literature and quizzing academics about evidence they can apply to reduce crime and get to the top of the informal league tables represented by Home Office iQuanta charts which rank cities and towns according to crime rates.

But the underlying motivation at this key practice level is the instinctive drive by professionals to raise service standards. There's a real lesson to be learned from those magnificent edifices on the other side of Great George Street from the Treasury - the engineering institutes. The medical Royal Colleges tell the same story. They were all founded and continue to be fully funded by practitioners to advance engineering and medical standards. This thirst for useful knowledge to improve practice provided the same impetus for the development and maintenance of medical and engineering schools in front rank universities.

This drive to self improvement is now evident in policing and probation and should be capitalised upon to seed new, practice-orientated crime and justice institutes of which the Police Science Institute at Cardiff University is a good example. In four years, its research, driven by the practical everyday problems of policing, has helped transform neighbourhood policing, given the Inspectorate of Constabulary the evidence it needs to regulate the policing of antisocial behaviour and discovered a brand new way to assess citizens' concerns about crime.

The history of medicine, town planning and engineering demonstrates that this motivation of practitioners to improve the services they provide can be harnessed to great effect by training small cadres of them in research and creating full time chairs for them in front rank universities.  When they continue to practice, these practitioner-academics integrate research, service and training so that the problems of practice continuously inform the research agenda, new evidence continuously reforms services and the training of professionals, and succeeding cohorts of trainees are steeped in the evidence informed tradition. These arrangements explain the feast of rigorous experiments in medicine and relative famine in criminology. It is a tragedy that in education and nursing, appointment to an academic post almost always ends a teacher's or nurse's practicing career and reduces them to the role largely of commentators, isolated in campuses and far less credible in their professions.

These practitioner academics, secure in universities, provide an evidence conscience for their professions. Many sacred cows have been slaughtered by the evidence they produce, accumulate and act on. For decision makers in government departments whose influence is not exerted through front line professionals in the same way, this principle needs to be applied differently. The Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, which is built on strong partnerships between policy makers and researchers and co-production of evidence, is an excellent model.

One conclusion is inescapable: increasing evidence demand is about capitalising on the instinct of decision makers, whether they are front line professionals or policy makers in government departments, to improve services.

Professor Jonathan Shepherd CBE FMedSci is a practising surgeon and directs Cardiff University's Violence Research Group. In 2008 he was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology. He is a member of the Alliance for Useful Evidence, and a leading figure in advancing the evidence agenda in the UK.