Grant: Operating Grant

Researchers in health care systems around the world have identified large gaps between ideal and actual care provided to patients. Some commentators have suggested that compared to developing new treatments, there is more to gain by working to close this gap so that patients consistently receive the treatments that we already know are effective. One very common method for encouraging health care providers to improve their practice is called audit and feedback, where a summary of some aspect of current practice behaviour is fed back to individual providers, teams, or health care organizations, often with a recommendation about how to improve. While evidence says that such feedback can be effective, it often is not. This is because we do not understand how or why audit and feedback works, or the conditions that make it more likely to be effective. There is considerable theoretical work that might be used to inform our understanding of audit and feedback; so much, in fact, that there needs to be a systematic approach both for identifying relevant theoretical work, and for prioritizing which areas we should target for future research. This study will lay the foundation for a theoretical understanding of audit and feedback by identifying and prioritizing theory-informed predictions about how to improve this important class of knowledge translation interventions. We will: 1) develop a list of clear, testable predictions about how to improve audit and feedback interventions based on wide range of theoretical perspectives; 2) explore the extent to which existing audit and feedback interventions already conform to these predictions; and 3) obtain consensus within the audit and feedback research community about which predictions should be prioritized for future research. This work should improve our ability to develop consistently effective audit and feedback interventions that improve the quality of Canadian healthcare.