215 General Discussion was driven by the need to inform the redesign of the Gemeentepolis and by genuinely believing that evidence would be pivotal to that. This commitment led to recruiting other municipalities and health insurers to join the collaboration when this was one of the few solutions for data purposes and getting the project endorsed by the Municipality Health Director. Unfortunately, none of these efforts could overcome the ungrounded concerns with the data linkage. In summary, successful collaborations highly depend on the parties involved. Still, some significant challenges might arise. The implementation of GPRD and data governance processes presents a considerable barrier to research, primarily due to the risk-averse way these pieces are interpreted. Answering policy-relevant questions on time The previous experience briefly touched on the importance of timing to create policyrelevant evidence. To increase the likelihood of findings being used, researchers should align their output with the time window in which these results are needed. This is particularly difficult because research and policy worlds live at entirely different speeds, as was seen in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many other researchers, the lockdown and unmeasurable number of questions to be answered led me to invest time in a COVID-19-related project. This project aimed to identify possible health equity effects of lockdowns and subsequent mitigation policies, combining an analysis (local) measures implemented in Rotterdam with the knowledge existing in international academic literature. Entirely conceived and led together with other junior researcher, the project was funded by Stichting Erasmus Trustfonds. The grant I was co-applicant with provided a budget to hire a research assistant. The project was not co-created with policy-makers but has involved them extensively since the early days, from data collection of policy actions to disseminating findings. The project output comprises a report and dissemination materials communicating the results in an infographic and a 2-minute video2. For this PhD trajectory, the most relevant is probably the learnings that came with this experience. The project had two significant challenges. The first related to bridging information available in policy documents with research output, using the former to develop the questions for the latter. For that, we needed to create a phased approach in which policies were converted into equity questions, conveying those interventions’ potential equity harms and benefits. These equity questions were then mapped into exposures, which could be searched in the literature for their effect. Evidence on effects would often not be available for the subgroup of interest. In these cases, concluding about equity effects meant bringing together average effects and risk factors for some groups to being exposed (Figure 3). 2 Report and dissemination materials available in the webpage of CEPHIR https://cephir.nl/policies-during-thecovid-19-crisis-and-health-inequalities-in-rotterdam/ 7
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