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22 April 2024
Helen Baxter is a member of the Knowledge Mobilisation Alliance and works as a Research Fellow in Knowledge Mobilisation and Implementation at the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration West. Helen previously held a role as a Senior Research Fellow in the Knowledge Mobilisation and Dissemination team at the NIHR. In this blog she explores the relationship between knowledge mobilisers and implementation scientists, and how it’s changed over recent years.
While watching the television staying with my husband’s family in Italy, I was struck by the number of times Italian newsreaders referred to our “cousins in France” or “our French cousins”.
I was quite tickled by this as an English woman, and laughingly questioned my husband about why Italians felt so closely connected to the French. His response was interesting, as he explained that although there are plenty of disagreements between the French and Italian people, the two nations have a lot in common and so much shared history that they feel related in many ways.
The warmth of this view struck me, as a knowledge mobilisation practitioner studying how relationships are formed and maintained, and as someone living within a real-life mixed cultural family at home.
This image of the wider Mediterranean family bubbled to the surface when I was trying to think more about the relationship between the knowledge mobilisers and implementation scientists. What was our shared history, how did we disagree and where is our relationship going now? Are we distant relatives or in fact close cousins?
Knowledge mobilisation has its origins in Canada and there’s some evidence that implementation science first began in the United States, although the official journal in 2006 is often given as the first inception of the term (Beidas, 2022).
Similarly, although its roots can be traced way back to 1800s, the first journal articles using the term knowledge mobilisation are found in the early 2000s.
Both fields originated to address the research to practice gap in acknowledging that for academic research to be used and to be useful to society and practice, it was going to require a little help.
Knowledge mobilisers tend to view knowledge creation as a process and to focus on how to share it across communities to create new knowledge (Knowledge Mobilisation Alliance, 2019).
This process of sharing (including blending and reshaping) knowledge with users’ knowledge (clinicians, decision makers, public partners) creates new knowledge that’s more suitable for use by others, rather than just researchers.
Although this knowledge sharing and creation process has been described and reported in the knowledge mobilisation literature, the field has been less explicit on how best this is done. There’s a lack of evaluation of method and of underlying theoretical bases (Baxter, 2024).
In contrast, implementation scientists have been self-critical. They feel they’ve been too focused on theory and understanding the scientific method around implementation to achieve what they set out to (Rapport,2021).
This view is of knowledge as a product that, through scientific methods and the examination of context, can be successfully implemented into practice and society. It leans heavily on a theoretical basis to explain causation and generate replicability.
However, many working in the field are frustrated that this doesn’t seem enough to achieve the end goal of the use of research findings in practice.
Right now, it’s interesting to stand back from the two cousins and to see just how much common ground there actually is.
Fortunately, academic curiosity knows no bounds and good ideas are being snaffled on both sides with relish. There is much to agree on, with implementation scientists calling for engagement with users from the outset of a research study and knowledge mobilisers pushing for the evaluation and theoretical underpinnings of their methods.
So maybe what’s most needed is a family occasion to come together, to reflect on what’s been achieved in the mutual aim of serving health care practice and the wider population.
I was thinking of a good old-fashioned conference meet-up, preferably with a free bar…