KTE: What tools work best in measuring its impact?

*Cough*, *cough*, *cough*. Do you use your hand to cover your mouth when you cough? Or do you raise your arm to your face and cough into your sleeve? If you cough in your sleeve, when did you first realize that this is how it’s done to help prevent spreading germs?

In recent years, public health agencies from around the world – including Canada – have launched approaches such as social media campaigns that teach people how to cough or sneeze to help prevent spreading infectious diseases like influenza. So did they work? Did these approaches help to teach you about coughing into your sleeve and potentially help prevent disease? Did it work?

“Did it work?” This is a question that we probably ask every day, yet we don’t always realize the importance of these three simple words. Did my computer turn on when I pushed the power switch? Did my vision improve when I put on my glasses? We may not always be conscious of it, but we are constantly conducting evaluations.

These questions and answers help us to understand what works and what doesn’t so that we know how to improve things. The concept of evaluation sometimes sounds simple enough, but how can you apply this to more complex issues, such as knowledge transfer and exchange, or KTE?

KTE – an emerging practice in many organizations – is the art of putting research evidence into the hands of key decision-makers in a timely, accessible and useful manner. The “exchange” part in KTE means that stakeholders are either involved in or informed of research projects that may be relevant to them.

A keen research team from the Institute for Work & Health and partners are trying to find out what tools can be used to assess KTE practices and their impact. The team is conducting a systematic review to identify tools or instruments – such as surveys – that effectively evaluate KTE.

“Research funders are demanding to know whether their investments are making a difference,” says IWH Associate Scientist Dwayne Van Eerd, the review’s principal investigator. “Our systematic review will identify what are the best tools to evaluate and assess a KTE initiative and its impact.”

Broad literature search
Using the Institute’s established systematic review framework, the team – composed of researchers, KTE practitioners and information scientists – will systematically search both qualitative and quantitative articles that encompass many fields including clinical, agricultural and management services.

Capturing all of the tools that involve knowledge transfer and exchange evaluation is fundamental to the review, which is why the team is looking at many fields.

The team also hopes to describe each tool, including its measurement properties, and to comment on how to evaluate a KTE program. In the coughing-in-your-sleeve example above, the original KTE effort might be the ways in which the public health agency reached out to the general public with the information, and the KTE tool might be a survey that explores how effective the effort was in getting people to use this information.

The results of the systematic review may indeed help KTE practitioners answer the question, “Did it work?”

Watch for preliminary results of this review late in 2010.