Details for Policy guidance on threats to legislative interventions in public health: a realist synthesis

Geoff Wong, Ray Pawson and Lesley Owen

Legislation is one of the most powerful weapons for improving population health and is often used by policy and decision makers. Little research exists to guide them as to whether legislation is feasible and/or will succeed. This paper details work which aimed to produce a coherent and transferable evidence based framework of threats to legislative interventions to assist the decision making process and to test this through the 'case study' of legislation to ban smoking in cars carrying children.