New role fuels CISS reasearch drive

The position, commencing mid-2017, is designed to build staff capacity for knowledge translation (KT) and evidence-based practice (EBP) by providing leadership, mentoring and assistance to CISS staff for research implementation, education and the development of EBP and KT. The new role is a first within Metro North Hospital and Health Service, and one of the only such roles in public health services across the state.

CISS senior occupational therapist and project lead Dr Sally Eames, who has lead the development of the CEDO role, says CISS is primed to reap the benefits of investing in knowledge translation.

“The idea of the CEDO position is to apply specialised skills to provide high-level advice, develop EBP and KT training and resources, and support the application of formal KT frameworks and implementation of science research across CISS,” she says.

“By using KT frameworks, ideally, we can help clinicians to make clinical practice changes that stick and are more sustainable, which is more cost effective in the long run, plus any resources that we invest towards updating clinical practice will also make that practice more efficient longer term.”

Sally says improving KT support within CISS could also help fill gaps currently experienced regarding a lack of appropriate clinical research applicable in
community settings.

“There’s a lot of research relevant to acute hospital settings, but within CISS a lot of initiatives have been born purely because the evidence to support what we should be doing doesn’t exist,” she says.

“The CEDO role opens the opportunity for us to drive research that’s not already happening that is relevant to the unique populations we have within CISS, and then immediately feed that back for translation into practice.”

Sally says she sees the CEDO role having strong potential to influence the KT program across Metro North and beyond.

“We’ve built an evaluation research project into the role itself so that we can feed back the outcomes to other sites in Metro North, and publishing and sharing the findings from this project will also help other hospital and health services to learn from our experience.”