Health policies design is related to a political context and must follow legal precepts, involving local stakeholders on its design and implementation process. Developing a proper and coherent political action plan for health public decisions in times of COVID-19 requires organization and information to deal with the current and future consequences of this new pandemic.
Nowadays, the support for public decision-making in contexts of great complexity and uncertainty has been the focus of theoretical and applied research. For this reason, it is important to have methods that can support such decisions by accounting for multiple points of view and public policies objectives.
In this context, answering strategic questions, for instance, “what to do?” and “for what?”, as well as operational questions, like “when to do it?” and “how to do it?”, may benefit of cooperative processes of acquisition and construction of collective knowledge.
How can Welphi help in this task?
We offer a new tool designed to assist users in creating web Delphi surveys, the Welphi platform, in which participants geographically disperse can engage in debates at their own pace and time preferences, in order to generate consensus about topics set up by the facilitator.
The Welphi platform can be used to develop different Delphi processes that aim at:
(1) identifying stakeholder and experts’ objectives and the first list of health policies that can be used to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.
(2) collecting opinions on the attractiveness of each health policy to achieve the objectives, in several rounds of collective knowledge generation. Same, for the doability of each policy.
(3) combining knowledge and evidence in the previous processes to support the evaluation of health policies through the construction of a multicriteria model.
