What is evidence-based public health?

Evidence-based public health is a public health endeavour in which there is an informed, explicit and judicious use of evidence that has been derived from any of a variety of science and social science research and evaluation methods. Indeed, the practice of public health relies heavily on existing evidence. The question you want to ask is why? Well, this is because decision makers have to provide justification for their use of resources, especially because there are limited, scarce resources to go around. So whatever decisions that are made, have to be made based on the best available evidence that guarantees the best use of the limited resources.

In the quest for evidence in public health, over the last few decades, there has been an increase in demand for decisions made for resource allocation and priority setting in public health to be more explicit rather than implicit. In fact, evidence based public health and policies therefore emphasise the use of systematically generated data rather than intuition, in providing these explicit justifications for health decisions being made by stakeholders.