Grant: Operating Grant - Priority Announcement: Knowledge Translation

Researchers in health care systems around the world have identified large gaps between 'ideal' and actual care provided to patients. Some commentators have suggested that there is more to gain by working to close this gap so that patients consistently receive the treatments that we already know are effective than through the development of novel treatments. One of the most commonly used methods for encouraging health care providers to improve their practice is a technique called audit and feedback, where a summary of current practice behaviour is 'fed back' to individual providers, teams, or health care organizations, often with a recommendation about how to improve. While evidence says that such feedback can be effective, it often isn't, because we don't understand how or why it works; that is, we don't have a theoretical understanding of feedback. This study will examine whether theories from cognitive and educational psychology can help explain how feedback works so that future feedback interventions can be more effective. We will: 1) conduct a detailed review of the scientific literature to examine how theory has already informed feedback interventions; 2) interview developers of feedback interventions about theories they may have used to design their study or understand their results; 3) ask experts in psychology to tell us what theories may be relevant to feedback interventions; and 4) develop a new kind of feedback intervention based on these new ideas. This work will serve as the foundation for larger-scale studies that will formally assess whether this new kind of feedback intervention can more effectively work to change the behaviours of health care providers to improve outcomes for patients.