As part of its platform development activities, The CAPTURE Project is continuing to consult with the public heath practice community in order to ensure the platform’s features and functionality are consistent with practitioner needs. This is why on December 15, 2009, The CAPTURE Project held a consultation with a large group of public health practitioners and managers at the Peel Region Public Health.
What we did
The sixty-three public health practitioners and managers who attended the consultation were asked to respond to a series of prompts and record their responses on note paper. The responses were transcribed and content analyzed to identify themes. The resulting analysis is presented in a report entitled Summary of Practitioner Perspectives on Evidence from Peel Region Public Health.
What we learned
The consultation exercise confirmed that Peel health promotion managers and practitioners incorporate evidence into their practices. We learned that practitioners use the following kinds of evidence in their practice:
- evidence derived from a range of methodologies;
- population level data;
- intervention details;
- contextual information for program adaptation; and
- experiential knowledge for program implementation.
The evidence they currently use is mostly academic in nature, yet what they want to be able to incorporate into their practice is evidence of a different kind – “real-world” evidence. They distinguished “real-world” evidence from academic evidence by characterizing the former as including:
- a practice-based perspective
- a learning orientation, and
- a contextualized approach.
When asked about the various barriers and facilitators to collecting, sharing and using evidence, the responses fell into four main themes that very much echoed feedback we obtained through previous consultations such as the NCC session, key informant interviews and the fall consultative workshop.
- Resources-related barriers (e.g funding, time and human resources)
- Capacity barriers (e.g. lack of skills or lack of confidence in research and evaluation expertise)
- Organizational culture (e.g. the perceived value of data collection and interest by managers and public health peers)
- Collection specific barriers (e.g. access to the population of interest or the willingness of individuals to participate in data collection)
What we will do
In response to practitioner needs, CAPTURE is developing both high-tech and high-touch supports that will facilitate evidence-informed practice. High tech supports will include on-line program and evaluation planning tools, data collection instruments, data entry and analysis features, and reporting capacity. To complement the high tech features, CAPTURE will provide a range of high touch supports to increase usage of the platform and to enable practitioners to share information derived from practice. High touch support will include among other things evaluation e-learning opportunities, a forum for networking and webinar training sessions to use the platform.
