Challenges and Facilitators for Implementing Practice Change Through Evidence Implementation Fellowships

Getting best practices translated into clinical care is a complex process that requires a strong understanding of knowledge translation, change and leadership. The knowledge-practice gap is well documented with it commonly reported to take up to 17 years for new knowledge to be integrated into routine practice. The academic/clinical practice partnerships have developed approaches for having clinical scholars collaborate with academic mentors to work on organization-specific problems to define priority clinical problems, search for evidence in response to the problems, define best practices, measure performance in relation to best practices and implement team-based strategies for introducing new evidence-based approaches to solve the identified problems.

This process is indeed complex and teams have encountered common challenges when conducting this translational research in real world settings. All have found that competing demands of complex organizations both on a daily and more strategic level have challenged the knowledge translation process. Teams have faced challenges related to building trust, obtaining commitment, gaining participation of key stakeholders and adapting evidence and approaches to fit the context. There is a crucial need to develop ongoing facilitation and support to ensure project success. The presenters will provide approaches faculty and clinicians have used to address these challenges to advance creative thinking and a collaborative spirit. These are key to secure the ownership and accountability needed to embed and sustain knowledge translation into the organizational culture.