India Development Foundation (IDF), in collaboration with the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies (RGICS), organised a workshop on Enabling health research in India’ on July 21, 2007.The purpose of the workshop was to develop an agenda for health research in India. Participants included national and international researchers, as well as policy-makers and practitioners.

Through specific examples, the workshop highlighted three major impediments to quality health research in India: (a) lack of demand by public health administrators (b) lack of systematic data and (c) lack of training among the researchers in the methodology of health research.

It was acknowledged that we cannot expect the demand for research to grow unless we can provide solid evidence of how research outputs can inform policy making in public health. It was felt that the correct strategy was to ask relevant questions, use available data to see how far one can answer them and highlight the extent of data required to answer the questions more completely.

In this context, it was mentioned that every year, policy-makers, practitioners and researchers come together in South Africa to exchange information. While officials make presentations on their concerns, researchers inform them about the research that is available on the issues raised by the policy makers, as well as commit to carry out research on concerns that have not yet been addressed by researchers. It was unanimously decided that we should do something similar in India.

Various health data sources and types were identified. There was a lengthy discussion on how these data sets could be integrated with various other socio-economic data. IDF committed that it will put this data together and allow its use to all researchers. While the researchers said they will put such data to research use, the policy makers and practitioners committed to help IDF in identifying and obtaining the available data. Both groups offered to help in formulating relevant questions that can be (at least partially) answered with this integrated data set.

In terms of developing systematic data bases, it was felt that we should distinguish between facility-based information and household based information. If public health is to be viewed holistically, facility based data are not sufficient. It is not enough that we know about incidence and treatment of ailments; we also need to know the socio-economic and other factors that bring individuals to, or keep them away from, these facilities. This can be done only if there is good household data.