Research into practice: barriers and enablers #physiotalk on Monday 6th July 2015

On Monday 6^th July 8pm(BST) the physiotalk team will be hosting a #physiotalk on integrating research with practice. This is clearly a massive topic to tackle in one hour, so we’re planning to focus on key barriers and enablers when it comes to getting research into physiotherapy practice. This is also a topic that can raise heated discussion on twitter, so we’re expecting some strong debate. With this in mind here are a few areas to think about before that chat:

Barriers:

• Interpretation of research: How confident are you interpreting research, especially in relation to statistics? For example there are some interesting discussions around the value of ‘P-values’ in research.

• Time: Do we have the time (and energy) to sift through all the latest research and find the relevant papers (see blog post by Roger Kerry ‘I don’t get paid enough to think this hard’)

• Access: Do we all have easy access to up-to-date research? For example are paywalls are still an issue for physiotherapists without institutional access to databases?

• Cost effectiveness – how comfortable are we evaluating and interpreting the cost effectiveness of physiotherapy interventions? Is this important?

Enablers

• Professional standards: What do regulatory  and professional standards expect of us in regards to integrating research with practice?
• Guidelines – What are they, who produces them, do we have to use them and how useful are they
• Implementation science, quality improvement and change management: What are they, and how can they help physiotherapists integrate research into practice?
• Organisations and networks: What roles can and do CLAHRCs, AHSNs, clinical senates, professional bodies, professional networks and others play in helping services integrate research into practice?

Pre-chat resources:

• Evidence based medicine: a movement in crisis? (Greenhalgh et al, 2014)
• Evidence-Based Physiotherapy: A Crisis in Movement
• Video of lecture by Trish Greenhalgh: ‘Rubbish vs. Real EBM’

Questions:

1. What does integrating research into practice, and evidence-based practice, mean to you?
2. What do you think are the main barriers to integrating research with current physiotherapy practice?
3. What can help us to facilitate and promote integrating research with current practice?
4. How can implementation science and quality improvement theories and techniques help us?
5. What, as a profession, do we need to focus on in relation to evidence-based practice in the short and long term?

Chat support

• How to tweet chat
• Keeping up with tweet chats: using TweetDeck
• Professionalism and twitter

We kept the transcript open for 24 hours so that physiotherapists from further afield could contribute at a time that suited them – thank you for your contributions! We will continue this with all relevant tweetchats to enable #globalPT participation.