Evitah
Evidence Translation in Allied Health
NHMRC Partnership Project
Partners:
- Monash Health
- Peninsula Health
- Victorian Health and Human Services
- Latrobe University
- Monash University
- NHMRC
- Ballarat Health Services
- Monash Health Translation Precinct
- RMIT University
- Eastern Health
- The Florey
- Alfred Health
Background
Allied health managers receive little support to make complex resource allocation decisions in financially constrained healthcare environments.
Aim
This partnership aims to help allied health managers and policy makers make better decisions about how to distribute their resources. Allied health includes professions such as physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, dietetics and social work. Allied health professionals work across settings (eg. acute, subacute, community, primary care) and across specialty areas.
The partnership describes four interconnected stages of work.
Partnership Research Aim | Hypothesis/Expected outcome | |
---|---|---|
1 | Develop a valid and reliable online tool that facilitates evidence-based decision making by allied health. | The tool will be demonstrated to have face and content validity. Evidence appraisal sections will have excellent inter-rater reliability (Kappa>0.8).1 |
2 | Disseminate and train policy makers, managers and clinicians to use this online tool. | Over 200 allied health managers, policy makers and clinicians will attend training sessions/workshops, while instructional videos will receive more than 1000 downloads in the first year of dissemination. |
3 | Examine whether provision of an “Evidence-Based Policy Recommendation” document or provision of this document combined with a knowledge broker enhances the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of allied health manager decision making. |
More health services will adopt the policy recommendation with the policy recommendation document and knowledge broker compared to the policy recommendation document only. More health services will adopt the policy recommendation with the policy recommendation document only compared to nothing (control). |
4 | Develop and implement a system for ongoing development and dissemination of "Evidence-Based Policy Recommendations" from the VMAC-AH | The VMAC-AH will develop and implement two further evidence-based policy recommendations with uptake by >80% of participating health services that had not previously adopted this recommendation. |
1. Ref