Grant: Team Grant: Impact of Gender on Knowledge Translation Interventions

Knowledge translation (KT) is about how we to use research in healthcare. Its goal is to improve the care that patients receive through use of the best available research evidence. Unfortunately, researchers and those who do KT have not done a good job of thinking about sex, gender, and identity. Many KT methods involve using frameworks. A framework is a set of items or factors that may influence why people do things or why things happen. For example, a framework may have a list of factors (e.g., knowledge, skills, emotion, etc.) that may make an individual for or against using research evidence to improve the health care system. So far, no KT frameworks include factors related to gender and identity. It is possible that gender may influence an individual to be for or against using evidence to improve the health care system. In this study we will develop and evaluate existing KT frameworks will be improved by adding in elements of individual identity. We will conduct a study that includes 3 parts. In part 1, we will ask people who do KT to pick which steps in the KT process would benefit from including identity-related factors and do interviews with people who develop interventions to find out about their personal barriers to considering identity in their KT work. We will then use this information to pick KT frameworks and update them to include identity-related factors. We will also create a training course for people who develop interventions to learn how to use these updated frameworks. In part 2, we will evaluate the training course, comparing it to an existing training course that has no content on identity. In part 3, we will pilot the updated frameworks in 6 KT projects to see how they have used the updated frameworks.