Funders Forum - Evaluation and Next Steps

Thank you to everyone who completed an evaluation of the July 8-9 Funders Forum. We’ve heard from 17 of you about what you liked, what needed work, and who we should be engaging in this topic. We are glad that our keynote presentations resonated with you so strongly, and we understand that deviating from our agenda wasn’t something all of you appreciated. And we were pleasantly surprised by your response to the question “should this group try to build upon the forum meeting?”

If you haven’t already completed your evaluation, it’s still available online and we’d love to know your thoughts. We will continue to update the evaluation report as more evaluations are completed.

Click here to see the full evaluation report.

If you haven’t yet filled out the survey, please click here to do so now.

Your insight will help us as we decide how to move this initiative forward. We invite all of you to join us on a conference call that will be held mid-autumn to discuss the steps we should take together. Information about the date, time, and phone number of the call will be emailed to all forum participants and posted on this blog. You may also email Heather Kelley for additional information about this call.

In the meantime, we are:

• Drafting the “declaration of independence.” This will be sent to you by the end of August for your review and comments.


• Developing ideas for a consortium effort to 1) test and push implementation strategies and 2) build upon each funder’s successes for implementation-focused grant making.

Got any ideas for us related to these activities – or other things? Please let us know by commenting on this post or emailing Heather.

An interesting read...

Bringing evidence to policy makers

Policy+ is a publication from the National Nursing Research Unit which aims to deliver brief overviews of evidence related to current policies affecting the nursing workforce in England, the wider United Kingdom and the rest of the world.

Issue No 19: Role for Nurses

From bench to bedside. What role for nurses in helping the NHS make better and quicker use of technological innovations?

The adoption of innovative healthcare technologies with a proven ability to deliver increased patient benefits and significant efficiencies is perceived as slower and more variable in the National Health Service (NHS) than other healthcare systems. Nurses are the largest workforce in the NHS and end users of much technology at the bedside. Drawing on a recently completed systematic review, this Policy Plus summarizes what we know – and do not know – about the nurses’ role in adopting and assimilating such innovations into routine clinical care and considers the challenges for nurse leaders.



(c) Policy +

Learning from our Neighbors to the North

Soon, we will be sharing more materials from the Funders Forum last week.

In the meantime, we thought it would be interesting to share information about the strategy employed by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to translate research into practice.

"In June 2000, the Government of Canada created the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) with a bold, transformative mandate that included both health research and knowledge translation. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research Act (2000) states that the CIHR's aim is to excel in the creation of new knowledge and to translate that knowledge from the research setting to real-world applications in order to improve the health of Canadians, provide more effective health services and products and strengthen the health care system.

Knowledge Translation (KT), a prominent and innovative feature of the CIHR mandate, has the potential to:

• Significantly increase and accelerate the benefits flowing to Canadians from their investments in health research; and
• Establish Canada as an innovative and authoritative contributor to health-related knowledge translation.

In its first four years, CIHR, through its 13 Institutes, launched innovative programs that signalled its commitment to KT and began to build capacity for knowledge translation of health research in Canada. Building on its first four years, as well as what we have learned from the many experiences and consultations with the research producer and user communities, the time is right to further define CIHR's unique role in knowledge translation. How can CIHR best respond to what we have heard from stakeholders and what we have learned about the gap between what we know and what we do? What should our niche be relative to other players? How should CIHR set future priorities, allocate resources and measure its progress?

This Strategic Plan outlines the rationale, strategic directions and operational dimensions for responding to CIHR's KT mandate for 2004-2009. It builds on the objectives of Investing in Canada's Future: CIHR's Blueprint For Health Research and Innovation (CIHR Blueprint 2007). Its development has been informed by knowledge translation research; CIHR's original Draft Framework for Knowledge Translation at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (June 2002); discussions of the CIHR Governing Council and recommendations based on the Draft Strategic Framework for Knowledge Translation - 2004-2008 (March, 2003); the work of the CIHR Governing Council Knowledge Translation Working Group in early 2004 (Annex A); and consultations with CIHR Institutes, Advisory Boards, and stakeholders."

Learn more about the Knowledge Translation Strategy 2004-2009.

Later this week, we will be sharing the slides from Lucas Held's presentation last week. Also still ahead: video from the Forum.

INQRI Panel Presentations Now Available

At our meeting last week, we heard presentations from three INQRI grantees. You can now view their PowerPoint slides online. Remember, this is just a teaser for when we post our video in coming weeks.

Linda Costa - "Nursing-Pharmacy Collaboration on Medication Reconciliation: A Novel Approach to Information Management"

Jill Marsteller - "Linking Bloodstream Infections to Nursing Process and Context of Care"

Linda Flynn - "A Multifaceted Approach to Reducing Medication Errors"

Our next presentation

We are happy to share another of the wonderful presentations that forum participants were treated to last week. Take a look at Charles Cutler's slides for "Research, Innovations and Practical Solutions."

We hope you will take the opportunity to comment on the presentations and share any questions you may have.

More to come...

We're back!

The Health Funders Forum was a wonderful convening with much rich and lively discussion. Participants were treated to four excellent presentations, including one panel of INQRI grantees. In the coming days and weeks, we will be sharing the information about our meeting with all of you. Keep an eye out for links to the presentations, photos, video, guest blogging and more!

Thank you to those who attended and for those who could not attend, but are sharing our journey via the web. We look forward to hearing from you on this very important topic. In the meantime, the slides are now available for Elizabeth Bradley's presentation, "Diffusion of New Ideas - What Works?"

Thank you!

The Eve of the Funders Forum

It's hard to believe that tomorrow night, our forum begins!

We are excited to meet all of the participants in Princeton tomorrow evening for our first event: Elizabeth Bradley's presentation entitled "Diffusion of New Ideas: What Works?" Thursday, we will hear stirring presentations from Lucas Held and Charles Cutler, as well as a panel presentation featuring three INQRI grantees.

We look forward to a rich and interesting discussion... and we look forward to sharing it with our blog followers! Keep an eye on this space... video, photos, guest bloggers... much awaits you!

Two interesting reads...

Thank you to Funders Forum participant, Kate O'Malley (California HealthCare Foundation) for recommending The Science of Spread: How Innovations in Care Became the Norm, a piece prepared for her foundation by Thomas Bodenheimer, M.D.

Thanks, also, to Funders Forum speaker, Elizabeth Bradley (Yale University) for giving us permission to post her article, Research in Action: Using Positive Deviance to Improve Quality of Health Care. Co-authored by Leslie A Curry, Shoba Ramanadhan, Laura Rowe, Ingrid M Nembhard and Harlan M Krumholz.


One of our goals is to keep our meeting participants up to date on the literature in the field relating to translation and adoption. We will be posting articles and providing additional ones at our meeting. We would love to hear from you about articles you would like to see profiled. Email Heather Kelley with your ideas.