Making Health Policy

What shapes health policy? Current thinking dictates that scientific evidence should be the basis for policy making in healthcare, but is this a new approach, and how has it developed? Making Health Policy shows how networks in science and the media have established a dialogue for policy making since 1945.
Surprisingly, many of the networks influencing health policy are not political ones central to public discussion. Instead, scientific networks have shaped policies on public health, based upon findings of chronic disease epidemiology. For policies on illicit drugs, the clinical experience of a small group of psychiatrists held sway. And ironically in an ever cost-conscious world, high-technology areas – such as renal dialysis – saw economic considerations diminish as time passed. Health pressure groups entered the equation, and the last half of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of the media as the defining agency in the science/policy relationship.
Making Health Policy is the first historical study to explore the unspoken links between science and recent health policy.

Virginia Berridge is Professor of History at The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She is head of the Centre for History in Public Health, and headed the Wellcome Trust-funded ‘Science speaks to policy’ programme of research of which this book is an outgrowth. Her publications are on recent public health; drug, alcohol and smoking policy; the history of HIV/AIDS; and the relationship between research and policy.

”[A] most unusual collection… one of a new generation of interdisciplinary studies… Berridge’s thesis is convincingly presented in this volume.” - in: Wellcome History, 34 (Spring 2007), 19–20

“The breadth of interests of [the authors] has been a major strength, because it has allowed it to explore in detail not only the diversity of influences that bear down on policy makers, but the problems and debates about the ‘evidence’ that they are supposed to use… It is right that when historians study the making of policy they should investigate the doings of expert advisory committees. The big strength of this book is that it considers other things as well.” 
- in: Medical History, January 2007, Vol. 51, No. 1: 122–123
"Some of the issues covered here have received little scholarly attention so far; others benefit from being discussed from a different perspective. This is a useful book, and some chapters will be essential reading for anyone interested in the use of evidence in the shaping of health policy since World War II, not only in the United Kingdom.”
- in: Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 81, No. 4, 2007, pp. 897-898