Grant: Project Grant

This five-year partnered iKT program will develop, test, implement, and evaluate a suite of approaches to the synthesis and contextualization of health evidence to facilitate the timely delivery and uptake of appropriate decision support products for health systems in rural Canadian communities, including those with Francophone, First Nations, Métis, Innu and Inuit populations. The project will begin with teams in NL, Northern ON, and Northern BC who will organize a three-province program of contextualized knowledge synthesis and translation, and prepare for the expansion of the collaboration into other Canadian regions and jurisdictions. Combining approaches used in NL's Contextualized Health Research Synthesis Program (CHRSP) with those developed by similar collaborations between researchers and knowledge users in Northern ON and Northern BC, the project will undertake experiments and studies to develop the best ways to help teams in three provinces work together on products that are specifically tailored for the needs and contexts of each province's health system while optimizing engagement and inclusiveness and maximizing the use of limited financial and human resources. This research project is innovative in several ways: it offers opportunities for multi-jurisdictional collaboration that will effectively integrate knowledge users into the research process; it facilitates the development of knowledge exchange and shared work among researchers and health system decision makers in different rural locations; and it uncovers the common as well as the diverse challenges facing rural Canadian health systems.