Grant: Project Grant

Context is important to the success of interventions aimed to promote use of best available research evidence by healthcare providers in clinical practice. Context refers broadly to social, physical, structural, political, and relational influences on society, organizations, groups, and individuals. Context differs between settings (e.g., between units within hospitals) and changes over time. As a result, context assessment is essential to the design and delivery of interventions to increase the use of research evidence in healthcare. However, information about how to best measure context is lacking. Our previous research focused on obtaining a well-developed and clearly articulated definition of context and resulted in the development of a comprehensive framework (Implementation in CONtext (ICON)) of context domains, defining attributes and their features. Now that we have conceptual clarity on context, the purpose of this project is to advance its measurement. The study will be conducted in two phases. In Phase 1, we will conduct a living systematic review to identify and evaluate measures of context used in knowledge translation and quality improvement studies in any healthcare setting. In Phase 2, using our systematic review findings, we will develop a dynamic publicly accessible resource centre for context measurement in knowledge translation. Central to this resource will be a publicly accessible, interactive web-based repository of the context measures identified. In addition to containing an interactive repository of context measures, the resource centre will provide: 1) access to high-quality context measures; 2) micro-profiles of context measures tailored to users' needs; 3) a decision support tool to aid individuals in selecting context measures appropriate for use in their setting and their specific project; and 4) a research agenda on areas of context measurement where future development, research and/or testing are needed.