Grant: Planning Grants

Longer term care environments are a stark contrast to acute care. Unlike acute care that offers specialized unit care or service, home care and long-term care providers must maintain a wide girth of both general and specific knowledge due to the complexity and varied frequency and multiplicity of health conditions one is exposed to. In addition, the diversity of knowledge and the skill-sets and abilities of individuals involved in providing care and their proximal to distal relationship to the client (i.e., families, friends, caregivers, unregulated workers, and various professionals) pose significant challenges to an integrated knowledge translation approach. As such, it is unrealistic to assume that an approach applied in an acute care environment can be transferred and applied, or similarly supported, in longer term care settings. By using pain management as an exemplar, the aim of this 2 day colloquium is to bring together a cross-representation of people from community based home care and long-term care facilities to 1) share their tacit knowledge of their settings, 2) orchestrate change for quality improvement and 3) maximize the active use, contextualizing and integration of the best available clinical evidence. The colloquium will attempt to define processes that are: realistic and flexible, engaging of all the care team (formal and informal) and eventually tested in a larger research study. We posit that simply selecting and importing evidence based tools (e.g. practice guidelines) will not fully realize their intended impact on the practice change without first adapting them to the uniqueness of the longer term care environment. The overall goal for the 2 days is to detail the processes required for non-acute settings to integrate and adapt knowledge to their local context and how an academic research centre may play a supporting role in sustaining clinical integrated knowledge translation.