Building Capacities to Implement Best Practices

Patients expect to receive the best and most up-to-date health care possible.

Once research has proven a certain practice to be the best option for treating people with a given condition, one might expect that practice to become the new standard. However, it takes much longer than one might think: an estimated average of 17 years for only 14% of new scientific discoveries to enter day-to-day clinical practice. Many best practices are under-utilized, or wide variations exist across centres on their adoption.

In order to address this discrepancy, RHI, in partnership with the Alberta Paraplegic Association, Ontario Neurotrauma Foundation and Quebec’s FRSQ-REPAR, have developed the Knowledge Mobilization Network (KMN) in the area of spinal cord injury best practices.

The aim is to build capacities within six hospitals to encourage their staff to adopt best practices when caring for people with spinal cord injuries. 91 SCI professionals involved in the project nationwide.

The national network of the initiative allows staff at each hospital to learn from each other through a community of practice, and to achieve consensus on and adopt selected best practices in priority areas. The current priority best practice area for the KMN is pressure ulcers; once full implementation has been reached, the team plans to move to other areas.

As of March 2013, the KMN initiative has trained 325 staff at the six sites in pressure ulcer best practices, and has trained 165 staff in implementation science. Once it has gone through full implementation, the KMN will undertake an evaluation to determine its effectiveness in changing the behaviour of health care providers and improve the health outcomes of patients.

Learn more about KMN at www.scikmn.com.