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Category: commentary

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Commentary

The Month in Suicide Research (and Reporting)

For those of us who straddle between research and practice, it may not be enough to keep abreast of the scientific literature. It’s important, of course–PubTrawlr was founded on that assumption. And yet, there is so much more discourse out that that can help practitioners understand the on-the-ground conditions. And by understanding these, maybe we […]

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Commentary

C is for Champion

Whenever we go into a new setting, one of our first tasks is to find the people who to be our cheerleaders. These are your key opinion leaders, the person or persons who are your examples, your innovation-specific project leaders, and innovation advisors. These are the people who are going to, well, champion the change.  […]

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Commentary

B is for Best Practice

Let’s make no bones about it. We only want to implement things that will work. We want to select and implement changes with evidence that they will make a difference for the people in our communities. Implementation A-Z is our ongoing series about making the concepts of implementation science straightforward and accessible. So how do […]

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Commentary

A is for Adaptation

A brief introduction. Implementation science is the study of how to get good ideas into practice. Over the past twenty or so years, there has been a huge amount of academic effort spent studying the factors and variables that impact how different evidence-based practices get out into the community. There have been millions of dollars, […]

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Commentary

My favorite thing from NCI

In the US, the major federal funder of implementation science research is the National Cancer Institute. They have a full section, the Consortium for Cancer Implementation Science (CCIS) dedicated to getting good things into practice and understanding how to do it better. I recently came across this infographic, which is really the best distillation of […]

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Commentary

Evidence in Plain Sight: Building a News Article Explorer

Here’s the paradox once again. Implementation Science is very top-down. That is, ideas and best practices are being pushed out into community-based settings. The implementation science field studies what makes certain settings more effective. But but but. So many ideas never make their way into academic literature because it is incredibly difficult to write and […]

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Commentary

Reading (and Understanding) Scientific Articles

So you’ve started using PubTrawlr and you’re ready to dive deeper. You follow some links to the primary source, open them up….and it’s gobbledygook. Take a deep breath. This is a very common experience. Articles are not easy to read. There is likely to be a ton of jargon, and the writing can be unclear. Academics don’t […]

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photo by Nik Shuliahin from unsplash
Commentary

A roadmap for community transformation

Nobody ever said change is easy. Community-level change is our best bet for chipping away at pervasive health inequities, yet each community is nestled inside local, regional and national attitudes, policies, and expectations. Can such diverse systems be changed? Yes, but it requires not just change – but a total transformation. Editor’s note: This piece […]

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Commentary

Never require answers to survey questions.

The headline is the thesis statement. Do not require answers to survey questions. That is, never make any answer to any question required for completing a survey. Never. Don’t do it. Here’s why. Humans should not be unwitting subjects in scientific experiments. Yet, our history is cluttered with examples of this. The Tuskeegee Experiment. The […]

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Mer Island: Not my picture!
Commentary

Catching up with…Health Equity: July 2021

North American Summer is a strange time. We expect things to slow down. We expect fewer meetings because people will be on vacation. Because of that, I wrongly expected that research publications would also slow to a trickle. This was a completely wrong-headed belief. The last 31 days of research saw 391 articles across 177 […]

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