Dr. Jenny Mack:

On the role that the institute has in respect of public health and shaping public policy, we have a small policy unit comprising staff who conduct research and rapid reviews of high-quality evidence to inform the policymakers, depending on what policy is going through the Department at the time. When work was ongoing in Northern Ireland on a new obesity prevention strategy, part of our contribution was conducting a rapid review of high-level evidence on obesity policies internationally and providing guidance to the Department on the highest level of evidence for different measures, whether they were fiscal measures or menu labelling, etc. The type of research we did was live, in the sense that it can be updated with the best-level evidence. If the political structure changes or the Minister changes, we still have the high-level evidence that we can then update if new studies come out or is there is anything new to bring to people's attention. We are able to support the Department in Ireland as well. In the context of the development of obesity policy in Ireland, we have done this evidence review and can inform the policymakers with the evidence we have already carried out. In that way, using obesity as an example, we can try to support policy development on a North-South basis and maximise the return on investment for the research of the IPH.