“Professionals across the country are researching quality, but the results are too often scattered and not made available to others.’’
Suzanne Beyea, PhD, RN, FAAN, Director of Geriatric Nursing Education and Research, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
A major goal of the ISRN is to forge partnerships between academic and clinical researchers. Such partnerships can build the base of evidence for practices and ultimately improve care processes and patient outcomes.
But partnerships have not always come easily. “People who work in healthcare tend to work in silos,” says Suzanne Beyea, PhD, RN, FAAN, Director of Geriatric Nursing Education and Research, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. “We tend to just stay within our organizations, within our fields, within our per¬spectives. This makes it challenging to offer the best quality of care to patients or even to know what constitutes the best quality of care. We really need a circle so that practice informs theory and vice versa, rather than only staying in our parallel worlds.”
“Care providers often say that they are tired of being told what to do by academics who aren’t in their shoes. Research is a way for practitioners to have a say in framing research questions and terms. Their participation in research is also a way to ensure that research is relevant.”
Michael L. Parchman, MD, MPH, FAAFP, Director, MacColl Center for Healthcare Innovations, Group Health Research Institute
“A more participatory model of research allows academics to go to care providers and say, ‘Here’s the evidence we have so far on what constitutes the right treatment at the right time for the right patient,’” says Michael L. Parchman, MD, MPH, FAAFP, Director, MacColl Center for Healthcare Innovations, Group Health Research Institute. “‘How would this work in your setting? What would you need in order to do this?’ Then design a research project together to track the results and adjust the theory.”
Collaboration between theore¬ticians and practitioners on re¬search makes sense, Parchman argues, quoting a colleague: “If we want more evidence-based practice, we need more practice-based evidence.”