Moving Population and Public Health Knowledge Into Action: A Casebook of Knowledge Translation Stories

Preface
Knowledge translation (KT) is a broad concept, encompassing all steps between the creation of new knowledge and its application to yield beneficial outcomes for society. Successful KT strategies can include linkage and exchange, communication and education, policy change and program and practice improvement initiatives.

[Canadian Institutes of Health Research] CIHR's vision of successful KT is the exchange, synthesis, and ethically sound application of knowledge within a complex set of interactions among researchers and users-to accelerate the capture of the benefits of research for Canadians through improved health, more effective services and products and a strengthened health care system. A core element of CIHR's KT strategy is to support and recognize KT excellence; another is to act as a KT resource for Canada.

KT is also integral to the work of the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI). CIHI's vision is to improve the health of Canadians and strengthen their health system by developing, integrating and disseminating timely and relevant health and health services information and by facilitating informed discussion and evidence-based decision-making.

In early 2005, the CIHR Institute of Population and Public Health (IPPH) and the Canadian Population Health Initiative, a part of CIHI, issued a joint call for KT "stories" that illustrated both successful and less-than-successful examples of the collaborative development and practical use of population and public health research evidence. We wanted to encourage and recognize KT activity and provide a vehicle for publishing and sharing lessons from KT experiences.

We also wanted to highlight the potential impact of population and public health research evidence in shaping changes in policy and practice. There is growing interest among health and other organizations, community groups, individual researchers and decision makers in sharing experiences that lead to a greater understanding of KT in action and its better practices, including, but not limited to, improved programs and policies.

We invited individuals, teams and organizations working in health and other sectors related to the advancement of population and public health to contribute to this Knowledge Translation Casebook. Cases were selected based on review of the abstracts submitted. The collection represents a naturally broad cross-section of experiences-ranging from the use of research-based theatre in a knowledge translation initiative with injured workers, to developing a community health tool kit in partnership with Indigenous health organizations, to a large-scale international collaboration to identify issues in globalization, gender, and health.

The cases in this Casebook are first-hand, personal stories. We asked contributors to be frank about their successes and failures and to report, from their own experiences, what worked, what didn't and the lessons they learned. This Casebook is not intended to be a replacement for insights gained from systematic reviews of the growing KT literature. But many of these stories echo common themes about conducting KT in the Canadian context.

Table of Contents

Aboriginal health

• Developing a community health tool kit with Indigenous health organizations
• The Manitoba First Nations Centre for Aboriginal Health Research: Knowledge translation with Indigenous communities
• Understanding knowledge translation in an urban Inuit community

Child and youth health

• Knowledge translation in the community: The Early Child Development Mapping Project
• Joint policy making in early childhood development
• The Canadian Adolescents at Risk Research Network: Research for and with youth
• Should we teach harm minimization to teenagers in school? The production and translation of controversial new knowledge in addictions

Women's health

• The Healthy Balance Research Program: Knowledge translation for women's unpaid caregiving
• The Women's Health Surveillance Report: Translating research to policy
• The Globalization, Gender and Health Project

Occupational and workplace health

• Knowledge translation through research-based theatre
• The Agricultural Health and Safety Network
• The Quebec Network for Work Rehabilitation: The challenge of knowledge translation and implementing a program in clinical practice
• Interprovincial knowledge translation in occupational health and safety
• Translating research knowledge to stakeholders: The case of forklift safety

Infectious and chronic diseases

• Ontario's Asthma Plan of Action: Bridging the gap between knowledge and practice
• Lessons from dissemination and capacity building in the Canadian Heart Health Initiative
• The Canadian AIDS Treatment Information Exchange