‘Evidence-making Intervention’: Transforming Implementation Science 1

Session Submission Type: Open Panel

Abstract

‘Evidence-based’ policy and practice has become the dominant organising paradigm for health care and medicine in the western world. Within this, implementation science has emerged as a sub-discipline with a focus on developing methods which promote the integration of ‘evidence’ into healthcare policy and practice. Implementation science aims to understand how social contexts shape the delivery of ‘evidence-based’ health interventions, however such aims rely on range of ontological assumptions about the stability of ‘evidence’ and ‘interventions’ as it investigates the ‘transferability’ or ‘translation’ of these presumed-to-be fixed objects into new sites. This Open Panel invites papers which seek to return questions of ontology to the field of implementation science, grapple with ‘evidence’ and ‘interventions’ as objects in-the-making, and reflect critically on practices of evidence-making. We propose engagement with an ‘evidence-making intervention’ approach which assumes there to be no clean distinction between knowledge and practice, or context and content, and takes both ‘evidence’ and ‘interventions’ as objects produced and remade locally through implementation practices. Here, ‘evidence’ can be said to emerge immanently, a transient effect of its connections and disconnections with multiple other bodies of knowledge and a range of material-discursive practices, including those associated with science and policy. In keeping with the conference theme, this panel aims to bring together a transnational network of scholars with interests in the development, trial, transfer and promise of new health technologies, with the goal of transforming one of the dominant health policy and practice paradigms of our times.

Sub Unit

• Papers for Open Panels / ‘Evidence-making intervention’: transforming implementation science

Chair

• Kari Lancaster, UNSW Sydney

Individual Presentations

• Performing ‘Evidence’ at Scientific Conferences: the Making of Treatment Promise in the Hepatitis C Elimination Era - Kari Lancaster, UNSW Sydney

• Data as Practice: Measuring Outcomes in Australian Poverty Interventions - kylie valentine, UNSW

• Evidence-Making in Expert Accounts of Cancer Screening: Views of Australian Health Professionals - Kiran Pienaar, Monash University; Alan Petersen; Diana M Bowman, Arizona State University; Stephen Derrick

• Qualifying Leaky Vaccines: The Case of a Malaria Vaccine - Janice Graham, Dalhousie University; Koen Peeters Grietens, Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine

• Generating “evidence-based guidelines” in integrated care programs: translations and requalifications - Nathan Charlier, University of Liege

Session Organizer

• Kari Lancaster, UNSW Sydney