Decision makers stated that there had been little discussion of resource re-allocation across PHSA agencies, with each agency by and large operating as its own entity.
Decision makers stated that setting priorities in this context can be quite difficult and that they do not feel they have the right tools to inform such decisions.
Respondents across occupational groupings in the sample, but particularly policy makers, stated that evidence of implementation costs and cost effectiveness had been rarely available to them from the research literature, and yet were needed to inform scaling up processes: ' I think one of the barriers was the lack of costing information.
However, public health decision makers state that finding and accessing systematic reviews related to public health continues to be a barrier to evidence-informed public health practice [ 11- 16].
This is confirmed by studies such as that of Drummond et al. [ 10– 12], which revealed that, in the UK, 30% of local decision makers state that being unable to take a long-run view, due to the importance of their annual budget, is an important obstacle to the use of economic evaluations.
In fact, policy-makers stated that research utilization is already a lengthy and time-consuming process.
One farmer (and one policy maker) stated that environmental results take a long time to achieve, and the farmers cannot wait that long for payments.
On this issue, one decision maker stated that the PHSA has taken "a whole bunch of agencies and put them together, and all their budgets together with them".
Although mostly perceived as a merit, one policy maker stated that when associated with enforcement, result-orientation may be rejected by the farmers, as they might deduce that the government does not trust the farmers to fulfill their commitments.
Another policy maker stated that the briefs seemed to be of most use to research policy, while a third meant that they could have a broader use: "International and national organizations, such as EC, ECHA, EPA, … publish risk assessments and overview documents.
A report presented to the public and policy makers states that 2.76percentt of the people in a community have been diagnosed with a certain disease during a one-year period, based on active monitoring that identified 8650 people diagnosed out of a community of 312,962.
