If it ain’t fixed, broker it

Guest post from Oliver Francis, Centre for Diet and Activity Research

Before I applied for my current job, I’d never heard of a Knowledge Broker. I’d always described what I did as ‘communications’. But a year in, this role has confirmed that the word 'communication' doesn’t really cover the challenges of linking public health evidence with policy and practice. In this time I’ve also met a couple of other ‘Brokers’ so I’m now a little less embarrassed about telling people my job title at parties.

As the recent Geek Manifesto reminds us, there are plenty of voices clamouring for more evidence-based policy making, so why does all this knowledge need brokering at all? Surely academics just need to publish their findings and they’ll be automatically taken up by policymakers and practitioners who want to do a good job.

Well, put simply, the world isn’t built like that. There are many barriers within the complex world of public health research translation. To take just one, there are often big gaps between the evidence that individual studies generate and the broader information that policymakers use to make their decisions. There are the practicalities of implementation, there’s money, ideology, politics, public opinion, the media. Or to put it another way: how many purely evidence-based decisions do you make in a day? Thought so.

Research translation: not so simples

One thing academics can do to help is make our research more available and easier to digest. So at CEDAR we’re producing short summaries of our research findings. Hopefully these Evidence Briefings are a step in the right direction. Indeed, these sorts of documents are increasingly common outputs from research groups, in addition to the wider syntheses of evidence coming from organisations such as NICE and (soon) Public Health England.

So, writing engaging and straightforward summaries of emerging, nuanced and complex evidence in no more than two pages… Simples! Well, actually, not so simples. For instance, how do we deal with expressing uncertainty for those who need to make clear cut decisions? How do we produce something that’s short enough to hold attention, but long enough to convey all the important information without a hundred web links? How do we convince a local authority in Newcastle to pay attention to findings generated in Cambridgeshire? People love case studies, but as we know, the plural of anecdote is not data. How can we make sure we tell only ‘true stories’?

Or should we just face up to the fact that there is a limit to what researchers can contribute to this process? Is the job of academic institutions just to produce summaries of the evidence in plain English, and then leave it to others to interpret them in the light of the demands of the so called ‘real world’?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Have a look at the first Briefing in the series about physical activity and schools, and take our quick survey to tell us what you think of it. Or post here, or contact me directly if you’ve something to share. Even if you don’t work in this particular area, your views can help us improve future Briefings on other topics, and hopefully make sure that as little as possible gets lots in translation.