knowledge exchange

What does the literature tell us about brokers, intermediaries and boundary spanners?

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Jennifer Watling Neal, Brian Brutzman and Stephen Posner

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article ‘Understanding brokers, intermediaries, and boundary spanners: a multi-sectoral review of strategies, skills, and outcomes’

Research evidence can help policymakers make decisions about society’s biggest challenges such as combating climate change, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and seeking racial justice. However, exchanges between policymakers and researchers are complex and often require the help of individuals and organisations serving in broker, intermediary or boundary spanner roles.

Although brokers, intermediaries and boundary spanners are recognised across the environment, health and education sectors, there have been limited opportunities to explore how literature across sectors characterises what these individuals and organisations do, what skills they need and what outcomes they produce. Therefore, in a recently published Evidence & Policy article, we reviewed 185 conceptual and review papers across the environment, health and education sectors with the goal of understanding the strategies, skills and expected outcomes of brokers, intermediaries and boundary spanners.

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Community support versus health care services: time to change our definition of impact

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Janet Harris and Alexis Foster

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article ‘Using knowledge brokering to produce community-generated evidence’

Non-profit community anchor organisations in England typically provide a range of support to local people, including wellbeing support, advocacy, social activities, and training and employment advice. This array of services takes a wider perspective on the determinants of health than the approach taken within the National Health Service (NHS), which generally focuses on mental and physical ill health.

Despite the different approaches, the funding for community anchor organisations is often dependent on the impact they have on health outcomes. Is this a good basis for judging the value of holistic support?

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Maximising stakeholder engagement to prioritise future research

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Natalie Kennie-Kaulbach, Jennifer E. Isenor and Sarah Kehoe

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article ‘Use of a knowledge exchange event strategy to identify key priorities for implementing deprescribing in primary healthcare in Nova Scotia, Canada’

How can complex research results be shared with diverse stakeholder groups? How can stakeholders be engaged in generating future research priorities? How can diverse stakeholder voices be represented? The transfer of knowledge gained from research to stakeholders is becoming increasingly important for the uptake of results into policy and practice and to inform the direction of future research. We take this opportunity to share our perspectives on maximising stakeholder engagement and strategies for successful uptake.

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Four practical steps to increase knowledge exchange between researchers and policymakers

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Peter van der Graaf

Keen to have impact with your research but getting lost in all the knowledge exchange frameworks and models that are out there? Based on ten years’ experience working in translational public health for Fuse – The Centre for Translational Research in Public Health, a UK Clinical Research Centre collaboration across five universities in North East England, we identified four practical steps to develop collaborative research and achieve meaningful change in policy and practice.

The challenges of using research to inform policy and practice are well documented, including in public health where the evidence base for interventions or programmes is patchy or contested. In response to these challenges, an abundance of models and frameworks have been developed in recent years that try to define the knowledge exchange process (how research evidence can be used, in combination with other types of knowledge, to change policy and practice). Practitioners and researchers venturing into the field of knowledge exchange are bewildered by the options available, which don’t go beyond the conceptual level and fail to describe in practical terms what research translation on the ground looks like.

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Policy impact is the result of networked approaches to knowledge exchange

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Naomi Nichols, Kaitlin Schwan and Jayne Malenfant

We have spent much of our academic and professional careers participating in and leading initiatives that are trying to change how organisations, institutions and systems function. The relentless demands of this work mean there is often little opportunity to reflect on the efficacy of our efforts. To address this gap, we conducted more than two years of ethnographic research to learn how community-university-policy partnerships use research and strategic communication to change how youth homelessness is addressed on a pan-Canadian scale. Our intention was to improve our own tactical efforts to ensure our research contributes to the types of changes we want to see (e.g. an end to youth poverty and homelessness).

We learned that networked knowledge exchange is central to ensuring research-to-policy impact.

In this blog post, we suggest three things researchers can do to produce research that addresses persistent social problems.

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