Tools for KT: Knowledge Translation Planning Guides and Templates
By Carly Leggett
Whether it’s project-specific or at a program level, planning for knowledge translation can be overwhelming. Fortunately, there are a number of publicly available knowledge translation (KT) planning guides and templates to help you organize your thoughts and activities. Below, we summarize a few of these resources. Note: this list is by no means comprehensive but can give you an idea of where to start and what might work for you and your team. If you have a valuable resource that you feel we should add here, please contact us via Twitter!
Knowledge Translation Planning Template
The Knowledge Translation Planning Template (4 pages) was created by Melanie Barwick in 2008 and updated in 2013. This infographic-style document offers a comprehensive checklist covering 13 different areas in the KT planning process, including patient and partner engagement as it relates to KT.
MSFHR Health Research KT Plan Template
The Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research KT Plan template (3 pages) is a short template intended for research teams creating knowledge translation (KT) plans specifically for grant applications. It focuses users on the core sections of objectives, audiences, strategies and evaluation.
KT Planning Tools for Allergic Disease Researchers
The Knowledge Translation Planning Tools for Allergic Disease Researchers (40 pages) document — although originally targeted to asthma, allergy and anaphylaxis researchers — can be adapted beyond and includes sections for biomedical, clinical, health services, or population/public health researchers as well as a specific end-of-grant KT section.
Guide to KT Planning at CIHR
The Guide to Knowledge Translation Planning at CIHR: Integrated and End-of-Grant Approaches (34 pages) is targeted to both CIHR applicants and reviewers, this 2012 guide looks to build capacity in both the development of KT in research proposals but also in the assessment of those proposals by reviewers. The guide is divided into integrated knowledge translation (iKT) and end of grant KT and offers worksheets and case examples in both sections.
Alberta Health Service KT Plan Template
The Alberta Health Services Knowledge Translation Plan Template (6 pages) was created in partnership with the Alberta Addiction and Mental Health Research Partnership Document. This document starts with a template of standard questions for you to tailor to your specific research project. In addition, there is a time chart to help you schedule your KT activities and a unique “Connect the Dots” appendix which takes you through a Choose Your Own Adventure-style [Editor’s note: for nostalgic purposes only, the link will bring you to the book series, not the section within the template] activity to map the when, where, who and how of your KT journey.
I2I Practical Guide to KT in Healthcare
The Innovation to Implementation (I2I): A Practical Guide to Knowledge Translation in Healthcare (20 pages). The Mental Health Commission of Canada first published this guide in 2012 with a subsequent 2014 update. Looking specifically at the concept of innovations and how they can drive change, it provides a seven-step structure for implementation.
KT Planning Guide of Guides
Finally, there is the KT Planning Guide of Guides (6 pages) — created in 2015 by the Knowledge Mobilization Unit at York University and the NeuroDevNet KT Core, this guide looks at nine different planning templates in an easy-to-use, summary format [a summary within a summary? how meta!] that answers the questions 1) What is it about? 2) How can you use it? 3) What format is it in?
Do you have a KT template that you prefer to use? Send it our way — we’re always looking to build our toolkit of KT resources.
