KTTC’s first virutal seminar series _ on ‘the nature of evidence’, part 2 of 3.
Hi again KTTC,
A quick post re: today’s virtual seminar meeting:
The readings we looked at —
Straus, S. & Haynes, B. (2009). Managing evidence-based knowledge: the need for reliable, relevant and readable resources. CMAJ, 180 (9), 942-945
and
Bluhm, R. (2005). From hierarchy to network – a richer view of evidence for evidence-based medicine. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 48 (4), 535-547.
– focused on what makes for good/bad ‘research based’ evidence, which is to say that clinical experience, patient preferences, nor local knowledge/context were not addressed. We spent some time considering the Straus & Haynes article and noted that it seems to clearly target ‘evidence-based’ practitioners — (but) do they draw on multiple sources of knowledge?!?
We talked too about how the writing/availability of systematic reviews does little to mitigate time barriers — in fact, there are now so many SRs that keeping up with just them is a chore (!) MOREOVER, if one comes to rely on SRs, we agreed they’re likely to face the challenge of having to recontextualize thoroughly decontextualized findings. This led us to share/consider a story about a SR (for a particular provider group in a particular setting / geo-region) that included 20 studies, but only 2 were Cdn. That group wanted to privilege the two local studies … which led us to again reconsider what ‘relevant evidence’ means — in the paper, relevance is deemed to mean evidence that’s tailored to a specific specialty or discipline; our conversation prompted to add (specify) geographic relevance AND notions of ‘timeliness’ to the mix.
What struck us about the Bluhm article is that it’s a critique of ‘the hierarchy’ from WITHIN a post-positivist paradigm, which I for one take as comforting and refreshing, for as someone who’s located in a critical-interpretivist camp, i’d usually seen critiques of the hierarchy come from outside of the mainstream paradigm. Bluhm makes the case that the methodologies that are at play on the research bench are as fundamental to epidemiology as are the methodologies used to determine incidence and prevalence rates.
Much like last week, we were left with a feeling that the challenge lies in synthesizing different sources of knowledge. To this end, Bluhm’s metaphor of a network of evidence — characterized by interconnected nodes of knowledge rather than discrete and disconnected levels of a hierarchy — it’s an immensely productive metaphor.
FYI, there were today 4 participants in the VSS (plus a couple sets of pre-mtg regrets). We spent 5 extra minutes at the end of the seminar evaluating our time together (employing that old standby of positing ‘stars’, ie, that which we liked about the seminar, and ‘wishes’ for change/improvement. Even with additional prompting to elicit more ‘wishes’, the stars by far out-numbered the wishes.
To take a peek at both the stars and the wishes, and/or to skim through some of the points made during the seminar, click on the link below to access the (open access) google-doc that houses the KTTC VSSs.
And if you’re able to join us next week for the third and final seminar in this inaugural ‘virtual seminar series’, please do. FYI/recall, the readings are:
Cornelissen et al. (2011). Knowledge translation in the discourse of professional practice. International Journal of Evidence Based Healthcare, 9, 184-188
and
Ellingson, L. (2006). Embodied knowledge: writing researchers’ bodies into qualitative health research. Qualitative Health Research, 16 (2), 298-310.
If you have any questions or would like to find out more about how/when you might participate, feel free to contact me either by Replying to this thread or by emailing me at ryan.t.deforge [@] gmail.com.
Cheers,
Ryan