Strengthening public health research capacity to inform evidence-based policies in Tunisia / CONFIDE

Introduction Over the past 15 years, Tunisia has experienced considerable development in the political and economic areas. In this context, important reforms in the field of public health have been made, with the Tunisian universities (University of Sfax, University of Tunis el Manar, University of Sousse) on their way to educate the public health professionals who can contribute to the modernization of the health system. Funded by the EC through Erasmus+ programme, the CONFIDE project (coordinated by Babes-Bolyai University, having European partners the Southern Denmark University and Trnava University) has 3 major objectives: develop Centres for Evidence into Health Policy (C4EHPs) designed to ease future collaborations; strengthen institutional capacity to deliver state-of-the-art research into policy training program; consolidate national and local partnerships between the public health academic and non-academic sector. The progress The partners have jointly contributed to the following activities: development of the Centre for Evidence into Public Health Policy, 3 train-the-trainer sessions, 9 train-the-trainees sessions, internships for trainees, one policy game. To this date, 18 trainers have been trained by European partner universities and they trained 29 Tunisian trainees in the field of public health research, health promotion and evidence-based public health policy. The trainees will participate in internships in local and regional health institutions, to practice what they have learned. A policy game will be organized, to simulate collaboration between researchers and policy makers, for public health policy elaboration. Conclusions The Research into Policy training program has been implemented in all 3 Tunisian partner universities. The expected long-term changes are: young workforce trained into public health and evidence-based policies fields; university curricula modifications by introducing public health courses and developing of Masters of Public Health.