Funding outcome

Every year billions of tax-payers dollars are invested in the development and implementation of research based ideas to improve various aspects of child healthcare. Yet healthcare problems and ineffective care practices continue. This problem is in part, due to a gap between research evidence (what we know) and healthcare practices (what we do). This has led to a growing body of science that seeks to understand ways to best ensure uptake of research into practice and uses knowledge translation (KT) strategies to help with uptake. In child health there have been recent developments of research-based ideas/products to help increase the best available research evidence into practice. These products/ideas can target healthcare providers and consumers in ways that are meaningful and accessible. There is little research done on how to sustain these research ideas to improve child health. Sustainability is the degree to which a research-based idea/product continues to be used in practice after efforts of implementation have ended. Sustainability research is a growing field of science that needs further research to understand how to predict, aid and evaluate long-term use in practice. In my postdoctoral research I will (a) systematically search the existing literature to understand what current approaches exist to evaluate and predict sustainability; (b) develop a framework to evaluate sustainability outcomes, and (c) pilot test the framework across child health hospital settings that are currently using research-based products to improve areas of child health (e.g., infant pain assessment and management). This research is important to ensure that the money spent on these research-based products is warranted, and if they are effective, can be maintained and spread to other child health settings. This research on sustainability will inform the uptake and success of new child health research-based products developed to improve child healthcare.