Only connect

Posted by Janet Shucksmith 

As the Fuse Communications Group baton passes over from me to Jean, I’m claiming the liberty of publishing a blog post swansong before I tape my beak shut and get on with something else. We have done a lot in the couple of years since we set up the Comms group, but there remains a great deal we need to do, both in terms of internal communications within the family of Fuse staff and associates, and external communications with practice partners and academic colleagues.

Gird your loins! In the next five years, we have to:

• Establish a really clear focus for Fuse. Occasionally problems arise because partners think we are funded to be a support organisation. We aren’t. We’re a research organisation that thinks it’s important to do the sort of research that will ultimately be useful (hopefully in short order) to improve practice, help people make better policy decisions and improve people’s health. 

• Get the contact points with Fuse right – our new service, AskFuse, to be launched in June, ought to help here, if it acts as a ‘listening ear’ as much as an evaluation service.

• Get the communications right with our policy and practice partners. We have to be responsive and creative – let’s use social media, animation, podcasts, webinars etc to liven up our delivery. Listening, as well as talking at or with partners, is critical however. 

• Get the products right through which we aim to spread news about our research work. We are about to produce a series called Research Bites, giving brief outlines of project outcomes. We also need to make serious attempts to improve the information people post on the website about their projects; the website is constantly being improved to allow people to navigate around it more easily, but there needs to be decent stuff there when people arrive at the last click. We all need to accept more responsibility for pulling out the ‘what matters about this work’ themes. 

• Challenge ourselves to think about ways of interacting less formally about our research. Could we run a Café seminar series for example?

• Get out a bit and talk to different people. It’s tempting to always work with people who ‘get it’, but we need to be a lot more adventurous, and there are a lot of new kids on the (public health) block after April. 

• Get the Fuse brand recognised (and understood) nationally amongst other public health researchers. 

• Continue to find better ways to talk to each other, to mentor and support our early career researchers and to bring in the skills of our associates to enrich Fuse work. 

Mark, Jean and the rest of the Comms Group will be doing a fabulous job, but will need everyone’s ideas and co-operation. Get creative and communicate!

Editor's note: if anyone wants to take up any of the challenges that Janet lays down, or has any great solutions to some of the problems she raises, please get in touch.

Good CoP, bad CoP

Posted by Janet Shucksmith and colleagues

A few dogged staff members in Fuse had been talking for a while about the need to share experience of Knowledge Exchange (KE) in public health across the UKCRC Centres of Excellence. “After all we are the Centre for Translational Research in Public Health” they would say.

And so with all the Centres descending on Durham for conference and summer school fun this was an opportunity not to miss.

We were going to attempt to form a super-group, well not quite, more what is known as a Community of Practice (CoP); inviting anyone (not drawn away by one of the other workshops) with an interest in KE.

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

Excitement grew. What could we share? What could we learn from one another? These questions were newly critical with the second phase renewal bids for centre funding being drafted. Here was the chance to see what crept out of the woodwork when the invitation was issued.

A dozen or so good souls heeded the call. Introductions first, and the meeting immediately assumed the air of an Alcoholics Anonymous gathering..."I'm Stephanie and I am a health statistician.."..this in a very apologetic tone. Never mind, Stephanie. We can see past this failing and will be able to glimpse your inner beauty. The group thus reassured, it turned out that several participants were similarly (dis)abled. What was going on? Was this some crazy research version of the Mystery Shopper schtick? Anyway, it looked like there were enough fuzzy qualitative people to make the group viable, so on we sailed.

CoPs come in all shapes and forms but have the same essential characteristics. They bring together like-minded individuals keen to share thoughts and ideas on a specified theme, often to share resources, news and updates, as well as to argue and reason together to learn more about the chosen theme. So you can have a CoP on almost anything. Try Google if you don't believe us. Best of all the community of practice acronym opens up a whole new range of possibilities. Taxocop is, disappointingly, not a virtual community dedicated to improving the ability of its members to swindle the Inland Revenue, but rather a group of people who like putting things in taxonomies. Hmmm, I think I know where I'd put them in my taxonomy of strange colleagues…

Discussion swirled around, producing some new vocabulary for a few of us...'hive thinking' and 'hackathons' as a way of brainstorming practical problems in the field of computer software (not just for the geeks then).

We emerged with an agreement to continue and develop the CoP. First steps after a note of the meeting involved setting up a virtual community. Kevin Balanda from the Northern Ireland group volunteered. ‘We need to talk about Kevin’* was the comment on the following Monday morning after the first attempt at this went somewhat awry, but we quickly recovered and are now locked into the Health Well website and starting to explore how to use it. We will meet in the too, too solid flesh at least once a year at Centres of Excellence conferences, and may meet for events in between when we have specific issues to ‘hack’ over. It has in the first instance set us off exploring the importance of policy and practice partners being able to access the sorts of journal and report resources in which public health evidence is embedded ... Watch this space!

If you are interested in joining the Community of Practice please contact Kevin.Balanda@publichealth.ie 

*It is thanks to the hard work of Kevin that we now have a forum for discussion

A case of mistaken identity?

Posted by Janet Shucksmith

Towards the end of my undergraduate days I was directed to the notoriously duff University Careers Service. With no inclination to follow traditional Cambridge careers – think Burgess, Philby and MacLean spy ring or Cleese, Cook, Fry, Frost showbiz alumni – I told the careers officer that I wanted to make a difference to the world. Lacking information on entry level schemes to Supergirldom, he gave me a leaflet on the UN. Luckily for the world’s population, I grew up shortly thereafter.

Traditional Cambridge career: Footlights, 1981

My grown up understanding is more modest: as public health researchers we should perhaps be content to make small contributions. It is also morally unacceptable to claim more power for one’s work than is sensible when recruiting participants. I remember community education workers telling me how difficult it made life when youngsters naively believed things would change as a consequence of their research contribution – that they would get a dedicated playground with skateboard ramp or a sexual health service. The workers were the ones who had to cope with the let down kids when commissioners shelved our research report in the drawer marked ‘Pie in the Sky’.

Now our participant information letters are tediously correct in pointing out to people that they will get nothing personally from contributing to our research and nothing may change as a consequence. The best we can promise is that they will suffer no harm or detriment to the service they receive. Given this rather depressingly realistic estimate of how unimportant and inglorious research is, it still takes me by surprise that the general public occasionally invests the researcher with power beyond anything I currently dream of.

Lawrence, my PhD researcher, was castigated frequently by the citizenry of Gateshead last year for having singlehandedly introduced the National Child Measurement Programme. Whilst trying to explore the impact of the policy, a number believed him to be the original perpetrator of a rather unpopular regime, and called him to account for not having thought through the impact on children and parents.

Recently, invited to present research evidence to a local health scrutiny committee, my colleague and I spoke about a specific project on the impact of Human Resources leave policies on carers of those at end of life. At the conclusion, a councillor drew herself up to her full height and demanded to know why I had decided to close their local palliative care hospital? What on earth had convinced her that I had the responsibility and power to do any such thing? Me? I’m only a researcher, madam. You mistake me for someone with power and authority.

My worst case of mistaken identity came when we undertook research prior to the implementation of HPV immunisation. Despite ethically approved invitation letters and information sheets, it became evident that many parents thought we had come not to ask their views, but actually deliver the ‘jag’: despite our lack of medical qualifications or kit. We were more alarmed when it became apparent that many parents believed the vaccination was a precautionary small dose of cancer, and delivered straight into the cervix! The very limited permission we had to explore perceptions was construed by some as being sufficient to allow us to lay their children out and perform an intimate intervention. So much for informed consent?

As a researcher, one often feels relatively distant from the intervention that is being evaluated. But Joe Public sometimes has a great deal of difficulty working out our researcher role and distinguishing us from the rest of the cohort of powerful but unnamed and unspecified authorities who ‘do things’ to them.