Seminar at KU Leuven Department of Public Health and Primary Care

25/06/21

This week CEBaP’s manager Emmy De Buck presented our research projects to the KU Leuven Department of Public Health and Primary Care. In addition to her work at CEBaP, Emmy is affiliated as Assistant Professor to the Leuven Institute for Healthcare Policy, hosted in this department. She presented an overview of the Belgian Red Cross research strategy, with many examples of how the methodology of Evidence-Based Practice is applied to the domain of humanitarian and development aid. 

As a take-home message, it was concluded that Evidence-Based Practice can be applied to a wide range of topics. The field of pre-hospital care, in which all our projects are situated, is largely understudied and thus many research questions and gaps in evidence remain. Therefore a research strategy is very helpful to focus research projects and to become experts in the chosen research fields. In addition to evidence generation, it is important that evidence is disseminated and implemented in practice, and that practice again informs the evidence, which is called the “evidence ecocycle”. At CEBaP, research questions are based on needs, identified in the field, and evidence feeds back to the field. This way we make sure that evidence is being used in practice, and practice informs evidence.