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Managers have been neglected in health literacy research. There still is little known about the health-literacy status and needs of commercial industry managers. This article reduces the existing knowledge gap by presenting findings of an exploratory qualitative study. We conducted 23 separate semi-structured interviews of managers from all management levels (low, middle and top) and experts in the field of health management and/or personnel management. The qualitative interviews were analysed according to Mayring's content analytic approach using MAXQDA. The findings indicate that managers do have considerable information levels about existing health topics and relevant problems but have difficulties of discernment as to which sources of information can be activated or accessed in a timely fashion due to work and information overload. Even those who devise strategies often fail in implementing health-literate behavior. Experts and managers had fairly consistent views on the importance of health literacy among managers. Most agreed that mental health was neglected and that company conditions were important in influencing the ability to act in a way that promoted health literacy. The findings also show that strengthening of managerial self-perception, self-regulation and self-control, raising awareness and ability to take personal responsibility for one's own health, developing skills in handling large amounts of information and fostering open and trusting communication are all essential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the past two decades, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has supported the involvement of patient advocates in both internal advisory activities and funded research projects to provide a patient perspective. Implementation of the inclusion of patient advocates has varied considerably, with inconsistent involvement of patient advocates in key phases of research such as concept development. Despite this, there is agreement that patient advocates have improved the patient focus of many cancer research studies. This commentary describes our experience designing and pilot testing a new framework for patient engagement at SWOG, one of the largest cancer clinical trial network groups in the United States and one of the four adult groups in the NCI's National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN). Our goal is to provide a roadmap for other clinical trial groups that are interested in bringing the patient voice more directly into clinical trial conception and development. We developed a structured process to engage patient advocates more effectively in the development of cancer clinical trials and piloted the process in four SWOG research committees, including implementation of a new Patient Advocate Executive Review Form that systematically captures patient advocates' input at the concept stage. Based on the positive feedback to our approach, we are now developing training and evaluation metrics to support meaningful and consistent patient engagement across the SWOG clinical trial life cycle. Ultimately, the benefits of more patient-centered cancer trials will be measured in the usefulness, relevance, and speed of study results to patients, caregivers, and clinicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To evaluate a novel mentor program for 27 US surgeons, charged with improving quality at their respective hospitals, having been paired 1:1 with 27 surgeon mentors through a state-wide quality improvement (QI) initiative.Design: Mixed-methods utilizing quantitative surveys and in-depth semi-structured interviews.Setting: The Illinois Surgical Quality Improvement Collaborative (ISQIC) utilized a novel Mentor Program to guide surgeons new to QI.Participants: All mentor-mentee pairs received the survey (n = 27). Purposive sampling identified a subset of mentors (n = 8) and mentees (n = 4) for in-depth semi-structured interviews.Intervention: Surgeons with expertise in QI mentored surgeons new to QI.Main Outcome Measures: (i) Quantitative: self-reported satisfaction with the mentor program; (ii) Qualitative: key themes suggesting actions and strategies to facilitate mentorship in QI.Results: Mentees expressed satisfaction with the mentor program (n = 24, 88.9%) and agreed that mentorship is vital to ISQIC (n = 24, 88.9%). Analysis of interview data revealed four key themes: (i) nuances of data management, (ii) culture of quality and safety, (iii) mentor-mentee relationship and (iv) logistics. Strategies from these key themes include: utilize raw data for in-depth QI understanding, facilitate presentations to build QI support, identify opportunities for in-person meetings and establish scheduled conference calls. The mentor's role required sharing experiences and acting as a resource. The mentee's role required actively bringing questions and identifying barriers.Conclusions: Mentorship plays a vital role in advancing surgeon knowledge and engagement with QI in ISQIC. Key themes in mentorship reflect strategies to best facilitate mentorship, which may serve as a guide to other collaboratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing the use of evidence in policy making means strengthening capacity on both the supply and demand sides of evidence production. However, little experience of strengthening the capacity of policy makers in low- and middle- income countries has been published to date. We describe the experiences of five projects (in Bangladesh, Gambia, India and Nigeria), where collaborative teams of researchers and policy makers/policy influencers worked to strengthen policy maker capacity to increase the use of evidence in policy. Activities were focused on three (interlinked) levels of capacity building: individual, organizational and, occasionally, institutional. Interventions included increasing access to research/data, promoting frequent interactions between researchers and members of the policy communities, and increasing the receptivity towards research/data in policy making or policy-implementing organizations. Teams were successful in building the capacity of individuals to access, understand and use evidence/data. Strengthening organizational capacity generally involved support to infrastructure (e.g. through information technology resources) and was also deemed to be successful. There was less appetite to address the need to strengthen institutional capacity-although this was acknowledged to be fundamental to promoting sustainable use of evidence, it was also recognized as requiring resources, legitimacy and regulatory support from policy makers. Evaluation across the three spheres of capacity building was made more challenging by the lack of agreed upon evaluation frameworks. In this article, we propose a new framework for assessing the impact of capacity strengthening activities to promote the use of evidence/data in policy making. Our evaluation concluded that strengthening the capacity of individuals and organizations is an important but likely insufficient step in ensuring the use of evidence/data in policy-cycles. Sustainability of evidence-informed policy making requires strengthening institutional capacity, as well as understanding and addressing the political environment, and particularly the incentives facing policy makers that supports the use of evidence in policy cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: European Union strategies and programmes identify research and innovation as a critical dimension for future economic and social development. While European research policy emphasizes support for industry, the health field includes not-for-profit civil society organisations (CSOs) providing social innovation. Yet, the perspectives of CSOs towards health research in Europe are not well understood. Methods: STEPS (Strengthening Engagement in Public Health Research) was funded by the European Commission's Science in Society research programme. Within the study, we interviewed by telephone respondents of 13 European health CSOs, which represented collectively local and national organizations. Results: Research was valued positively by the respondents. Health CSOs did not seek to do research themselves, but recognized the opportunity of funds in this field and welcomed the possibility of collaborating in research, of using the results from research and of providing input to research agendas. Links between research and users provides knowledge for the public and improves impacts on policy. Research and evaluation can help in demonstrating the benefit of innovative activities, and give support and legitimacy. However, the cultures of, and incentives for, researchers and health CSOs are different, and collaboration requires building trust, a shared language and for the power relations and objectives to match. Conclusions: Health CSOs contribute social innovation in organising services and activities such as advocacy that cannot be satisfactorily met by industry. Engaging CSOs in research and innovation will strengthen the European Research Area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a “viewpoint discussion” based on a presentation made to the 2000 Symposium of the American College of Medical Informatics. It discusses potential opportunities for researchers in health informatics to become involved in the rapidly growing field of bioinformatics, using the activities of the Yale Center for Medical Informatics as a case study. One set of opportunities occurs where bioinformatics research itself intersects with the clinical world. Examples include the correlations between individual genetic variation with clinical risk factors, disease presentation, and differential response to treatment; and the implications of including genetic test results in the patient record, which raises clinical decision support issues as well as legal and ethical issues. A second set of opportunities occurs where bioinformatics research can benefit from the technologic expertise and approaches that informaticians have used extensively in the clinical arena. Examples include database organization and knowledge representation, data mining, and modeling and simulation. Microarray technology is discussed as a specific potential area for collaboration. Related questions concern how best to establish collaborations with bioscientists so that the interests and needs of both sets of researchers can be met in a synergistic fashion, and the most appropriate home for bioinformatics in an academic medical center. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the past decade, Stanford Medical Informatics has combined clinical informatics and bioinformatics research and training in an explicit way. The interest in applying informatics techniques to both clinical problems and problems in basic science can be traced to the Dendral project in the 1960s. Having bioinformatics and clinical informatics in the same academic unit is still somewhat unusual and can lead to clashes of clinical and basic science cultures. Nevertheless, the benefits of this organization have recently become clear, as the landscape of academic medicine in the next decades has begun to emerge. The author provides examples of technology transfer between clinical informatics and bioinformatics that illustrate how they complement each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]