Keeping on top of medical literature — it’s a pain, but does it have to be?
The transfer of knowledge from research to clinical practice is a cornerstone of medicine. No matter how advanced research is, if it’s not reaching the patient it isn’t changing or saving lives. Unfortunately, a lot of it isn’t. Or at least it takes a long time. Alarmingly, research suggests it can take up to 17 years for research to reach the patient.¹ Given the ‘COVID-19 effect’ on the speed of research, one would hope translation to practice is also accelerating. However, this remains unclear.²
There are a number of well-established reasons for this evidence-to-practice gap, or barriers to knowledge translation. At the Medical Library Association’s recent summit, they interrogated all the perceived barriers and boiled them down to 8 key ‘pain points.’³
In a series of short articles, we are going to address the key pain points. Elaborate on them and discuss what we at QxMD are doing to try and help you overcome them. Keep an eye out for the first in the series looking at access, early next month. We promise you’ll have no issues accessing this one!
- https://read.qxmd.com/read/22179294/the-answer-is-17-years-what-is-the-question-understanding-time-lags-in-translational-research
- https://read.qxmd.com/read/33865476/how-covid-19-has-fundamentally-changed-clinical-research-in-global-health
- https://read.qxmd.com/read/33424474/why-are-they-not-accessing-it-user-barriers-to-clinical-information-access
