Community capacity to acquire, assess, adapt, and apply research evidence: a survey of Ontario's HIV/AIDS sector

Abstract

BackgroundCommunity-based organizations (CBOs) are important stakeholders in health systems and are increasingly called upon to use research evidence to inform their advocacy, program planning, and service delivery. To better support CBOs to find and use research evidence, we sought to assess the capacity of CBOs in the HIV/AIDS sector to acquire, assess, adapt, and apply research evidence in their work.MethodsWe invited executive directors of HIV/AIDS CBOs in Ontario, Canada (n = 51) to complete the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation's "Is Research Working for You?" survey.FindingsBased on responses from 25 organizations that collectively provide services to approximately 32,000 clients per year with 290 full-time equivalent staff, we found organizational capacity to acquire, assess, adapt, and apply research evidence to be low. CBO strengths include supporting a culture that rewards flexibility and quality improvement, exchanging information within their organization, and ensuring that their decision-making processes have a place for research. However, CBO Executive Directors indicated that they lacked the skills, time, resources, incentives, and links with experts to acquire research, assess its quality and reliability, and summarize it in a user-friendly way.ConclusionGiven the limited capacity to find and use research evidence, we recommend a capacity-building strategy for HIV/AIDS CBOs that focuses on providing the tools, resources, and skills needed to more consistently acquire, assess, adapt, and apply research evidence. Such a strategy may be appropriate in other sectors and jurisdictions as well given that CBO Executive Directors in the HIV/AIDS sector in Ontario report low capacity despite being in the enviable position of having stable government infrastructure in place to support them, benefiting from long-standing investment in capacity building, and being part of an active provincial network. CBOs in other sectors and jurisdictions that have fewer supports may have comparable or lower capacity. Future research should examine a larger sample of CBO Executive Directors from a range of sectors and jurisdictions.

Assessing the research use and needs of organizations promoting healthy living for adults with disabilities

“…These rates of research use were not surprising as other studies investigating the use of research in other health organizations and CBOs found similar results [8,9]. Therefore, more knowledge translation activities (i.e.…”

“…Adapting to the local context (objective 2) Regarding preferences for receiving and reading research, individuals in this study indicated similar Only 60 of 62 participants provided their education levels ORIGINAL RESEARCH preferences as those outlined in studies by Dobbins and colleagues [11] and Wilson et al [9]. Specifically, individuals preferred receiving research evidence from conferences/workshops, emails and websites.…”

“…Half of the sample also preferred to read executive summaries, while one third opted to read scientific abstracts. A recent study with HIV/AIDS CBOs revealed that these CBOs look for research mainly through websites, grey literature and peer networks [9]. Therefore, these studies highlight that scientific research is currently not the most preferred or utilized type of research in organizations.…”

“…ministries, regional authorities and hospitals) were surveyed, 57 % stated that they received research evidence, but only 39 % reported that research leads to changes in the programs or services delivered by their respective health organization [8]. In an example specific to CBOs, the capacity to acquire, assess, adapt and apply research related to AIDS/HIV was also found to be low [9]. Because the uptake of research evidence generally has been low in healthrelated organizations, we believe that similar rates will be Implications Practice: Community-based organizations promoting healthy living in adults with a disability should provide more training and opportunity for their employees to use research.…”

Knowledge, knowledge mobilisation and the third sector

“…In addition, people working in TSOs often felt they did not have the capacity (in terms of time, skill, and resources) to access research. Lacking the ability to understand "what the research says/means for practice" (Wilson et al, 2011a;Wilson et al, 2011b) they tended to privilege certain forms of evidence (e.g. client feedback) over "research" evidence (Wathen et al, 2011).…”