An invitation is extended to all education, clinical, research staff and students to take part in the Journal Club for the School of Rural Health, which will next meet on Wednesday 10 October from noon to 1pm.

The next article for discussion is: ‘Researcher-decision-maker partnerships in health services research: Practical challenges, guiding principles.’

Anne Hofmeyer, Cathie Scott and Laura Lagendyk

BMC Health Services Research 2012, 12:280 doi:10.1186/1472-6963-12-280

Background information and questions for discussion are as follows.

Health researchers are under increasing pressure to ensure decision makers, such as health service managers, practitioners and policy makers, are represented in research teams to assist with effective translation of research findings into practice. This can give rise to practical challenges.

This paper identifies the involvement of organisational “insiders” as a particular issue for health services research. Based on the authors’ experience, some guiding principles are presented for dealing with the ethical concerns arising from such partnerships.

Questions for discussion include:

• Are the guiding principles presented useful? Adequate? Realistic?

• The paper focuses on the challenges associated with members of the research team being identified in qualitative interview transcripts as participants in the case. Do similar ethical challenges arise when working closely with health services using other research methods e.g. audit and feedback, observation of practice, consumer interviews? If so, what guiding principles could we suggest to guide researchers?

• Do you think working in a regional/rural context poses any additional challenges, or confers any advantages, compared to more populated settings when managing the risks associated with decision maker involvement in research?

Hopefully the paper will encourage people to consider how they approach research partnerships, so participants are encouraged to bring their own experiences of working with decision makers/health services to the discussion.

The facilitator is Penny Buykx and those interested can join by:

• attending Meeting Room 3 (Level 2), School of Rural Health, 26 Mercy St Bendigo or
• by videoconference (IP 130.194.213.113) or
• teleconference (9903 5988) from other sites.

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