Sharing the secret sauce
By Kim Barnhardt
You can have the best product, or in this case great research, but if no one knows about it, it’s hard for people to use it. That’s the kind of thinking that underpins OSSU’s partnership with Healthy Debate, a forum that promotes knowledge and discussion of issues affecting health and the health system. Almost since inception, OSSU has partnered with the journalism-based media lab to raise awareness of patient-oriented research and the importance of patient partnership.
As a new component of the partnership, Healthy Debate has authored an accessible, in-depth report on the OSSU policy and research roundtables presented over the last several years on pressing health care challenges, with the aim of helping improve clinical practice and change health policy. Topics range from ageing to improving access to primary care, building a better mental health system to Patient-Reported Experience Measures (PREMs) and Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs).
“Our goal with the partnership is to take that secret sauce from the roundtables and bring it to the wider world,” says Dr. Seema Marwaha, Editor-in-Chief at Healthy Debate and a general internal medicine physician at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. “That wider world doesn’t have to be the entire general population but this [the report] takes it outside a researcher insider world and to hospital administrators, government, patients.”
Each OSSU roundtable takes a deep dive into a specific topic, with presentations and practical examples of patient-partnered work that will help move the dial on health system change, from stroke recovery at home, building a stronger primary care system, patient reported outcomes after emergency department visits and more. The Healthy Debate report encapsulates this content with visuals in an easy-to-read format, providing a big picture overview of the work of the OSSU network.
“Really important work is being done across the province and it’s additive and incremental. What I like about the roundtables is that for key priority areas in our provincial health care system that are relevant to patients, it gives a snapshot of the body of work and key areas we need to work on, and an overview of where we started and where we need to go. In research we often get snapshots. The [roundtable] format is a great one because it covers a lot of ground but if you’re not there in person, you might miss it.”
The Healthy Debate report will make this content accessible to a wider audience, underscoring the importance of knowledge translation and knowledge mobilization.
“Disseminating knowledge and insights is a two-way street. We need to determine what information should flow through to different audiences. But we also need to understand who the audience is and how they will receive the content. What is the format, how will they find it, what will keep them engaged to hear more? Just because the knowledge is current or correct isn’t enough,” says Dr. Marwaha.
“What’s nice about this partnership is that Vasanthi [Dr. Vasanthi Srinivasan, OSSU’s Executive Director] and her team understand knowledge mobilization is important and that their role is to help with that,” says Dr. Marwaha. “They do it well and dedicate resources to it as it is important.”
Read the report and individual chapters by topic.
- Aging Well in Our Communities: Insights from the Ontario Roundtable on Aging
- From Hospital to Home: Rethinking Cardiac Care in Ontario
- Living with Pain: Building a System of Care Across Ontario
- How Ontario is Tackling Diabetes Complications Through Community, Data, and Innovation
- Reimagining Ontario’s Response to Drug Deaths
- Building a Better Mental Health System in Ontario
- From Insight to Impact: Scaling Patient-Reported Data for System-Wide Change
- Strengthening Primary Care in Ontario
