Knowledge Translation
These days research isn’t just for researchers; buy-in comes from all sides, including family and cross-disciplinary physicians, granting agencies and venture capitalists, and more and more the media and the public at large. “There are many audiences with whom it is important to communicate our research findings, and messaging needs to be tailored to each of them in a way that encourages them to use it to improve health and health services”, says Melanie Barwick, Director of Knowledge Translation (KT) for the Child Health Evaluative Sciences programme at SickKids Hospital and primary investigator of the Emerging Team in Knowledge Translation for Child Youth Mental Health.
Her team is examining how best to implement evidence-based practices in partnership with five child and youth mental health agencies and two school boards. With the help of a five year grant from the Canadian Institute of Health Research, her team will develop and test a model of implementation that attends to the quality of the evidence, the readiness and preferences of the clinicians and teachers adopting the new practice, and the facilitation provided by the team. “Many factors are important when bringing research to the practice setting, and we need to do this in a way that pays attention to factors that will help people to actually use the research and make changes to their practice” she says. “It’s really about how we make sure our science gets taken up in the real world and has an impact.”
The whiteboard in Melanie’s office features a list of her recent travel destinations, among them Lausanne, in the French-speaking region of Switzerland. Switzerland, where French, Italian and German all cross paths on the street, is in many ways a microcosm of Melanie’s own work at SickKids, a hospital where medical teams frequently bridge several disciplines and medical practices are always evolving. The ability to present knowledge clearly to a range of audiences is becoming increasingly important. “KT is a bit of technical writing, but it’s also about plain writing, and it’s really about being able to exchange information in a way that helps us to use it,” she says.
Her research has tremendous potential to influence how medical researchers and clinicians move evidence from science into practice. By the end of the project in 2012, she hopes to have tested a model that can be shared with others working to bring evidence into real world settings. “If we can learn what factors are important and give people a step-by-step guide, then we will be much better at bridging the research to practice gap,” she says.