Research and learning in the space of implementation science is well described in the academic literature – but so much of what I have learned about this field has been watching and learning from others. Particularly, how others come together to engage in knowledge sharing.
My latest opportunity to observe this was this October, when I had the exciting opportunity to attend the International Symposium on Pediatric Pain (ISPP) which was held in Halifax. ISPP is a dynamic multidisciplinary meeting with hundreds of experts from all over the world in basic and clinical sciences, hailing from a range of backgrounds (e.g., psychologists, physiotherapists, nurses, physicians, people with lived experience). If you’ve been following along with my blogs, you know that I am excited by opportunities to change the way we think about moving evidence into action, especially in health spaces. Imagine my excitement, then, when the conference not only dedicated the education day to knowledge mobilization (hosted by Solutions for Kids in Pain), but as I listened to so many speakers thoughtfully discussing how they moved evidence into practice to improve pain care for children. The imperative to actively make efforts to change clinical practice and think critically about how this was done was a strong theme throughout the meeting, and it was incredible to learn about how different clinical sites were approaching this.
What struck me even further was another observation. As I listened to different clinician-scientists describe how they successfully integrated a new pain management approach into practice, I began noticing a key (and promising) trend. In each of these implementation efforts, team leaders were collaborating with other health professionals and patient partners to develop and evaluate their approaches. For example, a psychologist named Dr. Susmita Kashikar-Zuck described implementing an evidence-based pain management program for youth with chronic musculoskeletal pain, and described the process of engaging other clinical team members, such as physiotherapists, to ensure the successful integration of the program in practice. Furthermore, insights from patients were sought to better tailor how the program was designed and put into practice. While this was a clinical trial, it clearly addressed many of the goals one would wish to meet in an implementation context.
Hearing examples of activities such as this truly illustrated the integral nature of having interdisciplinary partnerships at the core of any clinical activity meant to move evidence into practice, with health professionals, researchers, and patients alike included in these processes. Thinking about what I learned, it was clear that engaging in these types of collaborative efforts can bring about 3 key changes in how evidence is used:
1. Improved coordination of efforts: When everyone is at the table discussing how evidence can be used in the clinical context, different professions and individuals with lived experience can better understand how to work together and support each other to meet the shared goal.
2. Comprehensive perspective: When all the relevant voices are at the table from a clinical perspective, approaches and strategies for managing barriers and leveraging facilitators are more comprehensive and relevant to the clinical environment.
3. Better outcomes: The effort put in to collaborate and coordinate more often than not results in smoother and more successful uptake. Inclusion of different perspectives in the clinical environment means more relevance to those who will carry out the plan.
Progressing conversations from the imperative to mobilize evidence, to how this is being done was an exciting development to experience as an attendee at ISPP. The field of pediatric pain has certainly made efforts to heed the call of the longstanding gap between evidence and practice with collaboration at the heart of these efforts.
Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash
