Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

CONTEXT: Participatory research in healthcare organizations aims to involve researchers and organization members (e.g. patients, clinicians, support staff, managers) as research partners to improve health care practices, services and policies. This approach is particularly useful to develop and implement interventions and to encourage changes in healthcare organizations. It is important to assess this partnership throughout the approach to ensure the proper conduct of research. There are no reviews of questionnaires that evaluate partnerships between researchers and healthcare organization members. OBJECTIVES: (O1) To describe (i) the dimensions (major evaluation categories) and questions assessed by questionnaires that evaluate partnerships between researchers and healthcare organization members, and (ii) how the dimensions (and questions) originated, and how they were developed and validated; (O2) To create a new theoretical model based upon an existing partnership model that describes partnerships between researchers and healthcare organization members. DESIGN: Systematic review (i.e. complete summary of literature related to a given objective). METHODS: 1) Identifying studies using a specialized search strategy, 2) Selecting studies using eligibility criteria, 3) Appraising study quality, 4) Extracting data and 5) Synthesizing data (O1) Describing the origin, development and measurement properties of the dimensions (and questions), and (O2) Building a new theoretical model by combining the existing model and the dimensions and questions from retrieved questionnaires. RESULTS: This review produced a set of partnership evaluation questions retrieved from questionnaires as well as a new model that describes partnerships between researchers and healthcare organization members. CONCLUSION: This systematic review will inform patients, clinicians and other organization members and researchers about available questionnaires to evaluate their partnerships.