Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Canada's Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (SPOR) promotes research that is relevant and applicable, making sure that the right patient receives the right intervention at the right time. SPOR hopes to achieve this goal by engaging patients, clinicians, and decision-makers as research partners, and thus, working towards integrating evidence from health research into health systems and practices. To produce new research, it is essential to know what was done before. To apply new evidence in practice, clinicians and decision-makers must know what the latest evidence is. To work together as envisioned by SPOR, stakeholders need to have a shared level of research awareness and a 'common language'. In other words, being aware of specific research trends is fundamental to both conducting POR and using POR evidence in practice. Unfortunately, it is easier said than done. Health researchers and clinicians struggle to keep up with latest developments in their fields due to information overload and lack of time. Additionally, when patients enter research as partners, diverse levels of expertise and familiarity with research make it difficult to filter and select relevant studies of high quality. The proposed research project will study how members of multidisciplinary POR communities can keep up-to-date by working together and sharing the tasks of monitoring and filtering latest publications. Using mixed methods (integrating quantitative and qualitative), my research objective is describing how POR stakeholders (patients, clinicians, decision-makers, and researchers) engage in and benefit from collaborative monitoring and filtering of scientific literature.