Implementation Science
We can help you to transform you ideas and findings into creative solutions that reach your intended audience. We promote reach, relevance, and reciprocity to make sure your messages spark meaningful change.
Here are some examples of projects we have completed:
Patient Education
We supported the co-creation of a patient-centred tool. By bringing together patients, health care providers, researchers, and a national charity, we effectively supported people learning to use insulin.
Community Engagement
We supported important community conversations with a live-broadcasted "teach in" or panel event. With careful facilitation, audiences and journalists discussed the role of media in decolonization.
Knowledge Exchange
We designed an academic conference with a twist. By elevating peer-led training, failing forward sessions, and collective wisdom from group activities, we re-imagined what a conference could be.
Service Provider Support
Stemming from our own research, we designed a guidebook for services providers in Ireland to better engage men in health care. Our guide has been used across Ireland to improve practice and reduce stigma.
Managing diabetes independently can be tricky. Between competing information and unhelpful take-home pamphlets, people with diabetes work harder to keep up with their own care. In response, patients, a national health charity, health care professionals, and an implementation scientist (Jennica) came together to find a solution. We developed an electronic education tool for people starting on insulin. Collaborating with people with diabetes improved the script, tone, and content of the tool resulting in better reach and uptake.
Since its development, the video series has had over 24,000 views and won the Diabetes Canada National Innovation Award in 2017.
Our unique approach to knowledge translation fostered:
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a shared goal between diverse stakeholders
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a willingness to work differently to sustain a collaboration
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resources and leadership support to engage patients
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transformative practices that address power inequities and prioritize diversiy
Patient Education
Too often, scholarship is inactive, inactionable, and inaccessible. We wanted to changed that. We organized an interdisciplinary academic conference at the University of British Columbia in 2019. And, because of positive reviews from conference attendees, we were invited to organize the conference again in 2020. With the aim of making scholarship active, engaging, and useful, we created a unique platform to elevate graduate students and faculty who act on their learning to solve problems beyond the ivory tower.
By scrapping what wasn't working in traditional conference structures, we made space for new solutions to flourish! Instead of oral and poster presentations, we included TED-style talks, visual narratives, interactive activities, letter-writing to future students, capacity-building workshops, problem-solving think-tank exercises, humorous stories of failure, poetic responses, and more!
You can learn more on the conference website.
Knowledge Exchange
"In my 24 years as an academic, I have never experienced anything like what Jennica and Maya created: they completely reimagined how academic dialogue and exchange should be done: instead of seemingly perfect lectures, we had TED talks about the hurdles and difficulties of a particular research project, and instead of self-centred celebrations of results, we had 'failing forward sessions' where we shared the complexities and struggles to do interdisciplinary research and public scholarship.. As organizers, Maya and Jennica were extremely professional and engaged. The event was also in itself a political action: breaking down old power structures and hierarchies."
– UBC Professor and Director
Here's what attendees had to say:
Community Engagement
Canada continues to operate within a system of settler-colonialism and the media plays an important role in perpetuating it. Where do stories come from? How are they constructed? Whose perspectives and worldviews are privileged? Who has the credentials to tell stories? For which audiences? And, for whose benefit? Without addressing these questions, ongoing practices of colonialism fade into the background of contemporary media production. Such practices must be named and disrupted.
In this live-broadcasted "teach-in" or panel discussion, we asked journalists in Yellowknife to explore how they engage and represent Indigenous communities in the North, and how they can do better. With partners, Dechinta Centre for Teaching and Learning and CBC North, we co-organized, co-hosted, and co-moderated the event with celebrated author Catherine Lafferty.
Some 100 community members attended in person and 2,700 tuned in online. We received thoughtful questions, reflections, and strategies throughout the evening.
It is well known that service providers have a hard time getting men to go to the doctor, take preventative health steps, and talk about self-care needs. While many service providers want to do more to engage men, they don't always have the resources or know how to get started.
Based on Maya's original research, we partnered with an Irish university, community organization, and funder to develop a guide that supports health service providers. Starting from successful community health models and evidence from previous evaluations, we made information easier for busy practitioners to access, adapt, and use. Responding to feedback from service providers about what kind of resource they would want, we synthesized ready-to-go strategies, illustrative case studies, and easy tips into a free digital resource. This audience-driven tool builds capacity among service providers and facilitates service-level change. It has been widely used in Ireland to support men's community health programming.
Service Provider Support
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