Researchers and the Practice of Knowledge Translation: What do We Know? Part I
The Study
By Kathryn Sibley
I’m excited to share the first of several posts focused on the findings from our new study exploring the practice of knowledge translation (KT) among health researchers in Manitoba, Canada (where this very blog is based). The study was published in BMC Health Services Research, and it’s open access (i.e. free and available to anyone), so you can read it in full here. In this and upcoming posts, I’ll discuss some of the behind-the-scenes thinking about this project and our key findings.
Why study the practice of knowledge translation among health researchers?
I suppose it’s because the more I study KT and its processes, methods and outcomes, the more clear it is to me that researchers really are one of the key stakeholders in the process of moving evidence into action. As the producers of research, what they do has a critical impact on what happens downstream. If we don’t consider researchers when we are trying to advance KT and its potential to impact health, health care, and health decision making, we are missing a big piece of the puzzle. I’m not saying that we don’t need to consider the many other key KT stakeholders (people with lived experience of a health condition, health care practitioners, decision makers — to name a few), only that we can’t discount researchers themselves.
The challenge is that we don’t hear much about researchers being the focus of KT research. To date, this field has been dominated by a focus on research users (see examples on decision makers here, and health professionals here), and we continue to have this missing piece of the puzzle around researchers and KT. There are a few isolated examples from around the world (Australia, the United Kingdom, and Iran), but context matters, and data from our corner of the globe (Canada) suggests that researchers still need to build capacity for practicing KT.
How do we build capacity for researchers to do KT?
Applying recommended principles of KT science we want our approach to have a strong theoretical foundation, and implementation process models such as the Knowledge-to-Action Framework, emphasize the importance of preliminary work to identify gaps, understand barriers and facilitators, and tailor to local context prior to designing interventions and potential “solutions”. This framework served as our overall guide, and with that in mind we set out to explore how health researchers in Manitoba understood and practiced KT, what barriers and facilitators they faced, and what support solutions they felt would help them advance their KT practice. We interviewed 26 health researchers across all types of health research and career stage using a qualitative descriptive approach, and learned a lot. In my next post, I’ll discuss how the researchers in our study conceptualized KT from a vast array of perspectives, and the implications of their comments for both KT practice and science.
See below for links to follow-up posts in this series:
- What do We Know? Part II: Perceptions of KT
- What do We Know? Part III: Experiences in KT
- What do We Know? Part IV: Barriers, Facilitators & Perceived Needs for KT
Read the full article!
Full Peer-Reviewed Article: A descriptive qualitative examination of knowledge translation practice among health researchers in Manitoba, Canada
About the Author
Dr. Kathryn Sibley is the Director of Knowledge Translation at the George & Fay Yee Centre for Healthcare Innovation (CHI), Canada Research Chair in Integrated Knowledge Translation in Rehabilitation Sciences, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba. Find her on Twitter at @kmsibley.
