More on the research-practice divide

To follow up on Steve's last post (below) -- Colleen Bridger's point is a good one. A lot of what we've found in evaluating the Management Academy teams is that the barriers to success are not the type of things public health researchers usually look at. For example, as we talk about throughout the book, and I quote from Chapter 15, "the primary reason that business planners fail to implement in public health settings is lack of organizational support." Organizational resistance is not something that researchers deal with when analyzing the efficacy of individual interventions -- organizational support is generally assumed going in. Now this effect can be mitigated by improved planning methods -- improving communication with those who hold the purse strings, aligning strong community partners, etc. -- but sometimes, the research about whether something works has nothing to do with how it can actually work in the real world.


On a related note, one public health director who read our book in manuscript urged us to remind readers, too, that not everything they do can be put into this model. As she said (and we tried to acknowledge in the book), some things partners have no interest in contributing to, some things are just mandated and paid for by the government, some things are just mandated and not paid for but meant to be free. (Although nothing's free; it still behooves you to think strategically about how much these "free" things cost and how you pay for them).


We'd be interested in ideas from practitioners about how they'd like researchers to proceed -- what would they like to see come out of schools of public health, what would really benefit them and their work. We'd also be interested to hear from researchers about things they're doing to acknowledge and maybe fix the disconnect between what they do and what public health practitioners do on a daily basis.


Anne Menkens