Grant: Dissemination Events

The Canadian Action Network for the Advancement, Dissemination and Adoption of Practice Informed Tobacco Treatment (CAN-ADAPTT) initiative began in 2008, with funding from Health Canada. CAN-ADAPTT is a smoking cessation guideline development and dissemination initiative and a knowledge exchange network. The dynamic nature of the guideline will be facilitated through a wiki platform; updated by network members in a timely fashion, as new evidence becomes available and to reflect the experiences of end users. The term wiki refers to a collaborative web site whose content can be edited by anyone who has access to it. In an evaluation of the CAN-ADAPTT initiative, network members were surveyed and interviewed about their experiences. A commonly identified barrier to use of online platforms was a lack of comfortable with the use of online technology in general. We plan to address this barrier by developing and providing a blend of educational, training webinars and downloadable material to encourage our network members to engage in the use of the wiki platform. Educational webinars will be offered to all CAN-ADAPTT network members and will include instructions on how to use the wiki, expectations of use, what is involved in becoming a contributor, and discussions of troubleshooting issues. Webinars will be archived on CAN-ADAPTT's website and course content will be contained in a PDF file, available for download from the website at any time. An evaluation of the effectiveness of the webinar training will be conducted involving pre and post surveys of participants as well as monitoring website usage. Providing the training and downloads to our network members will help to facilitate the use of the wiki platform. We anticipate that the training and downloads will facilitate knowledge exchange among our network members and may increase our membership given the goal of creating a self-sustaining network and guideline.