Special Issues

BioMed Central TREC Article Collection

Translating Research in Elder Care: An applied program of health services research

Series Editors: Carole A. Estabrooks and Peter Norton

The Translating Research in Elder Care (TREC) program is an observational multi-method health services research project underway in the prairie provinces of Canada (funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research). Its focus is improving care delivered in nursing homes. TREC is designed to establish the associations between organizational context, bedside knowledge use, work life quality for caregivers, and resident outcomes. The data sources for TREC include direct reports from frontline caregivers and their managers, facility and unit demographic data, and clinical outcome data generated as part of the regular care process using the interRAI Resident Assessment Instrument system.

These articles describe the protocols for the Translating Research in Elder Care (TREC) program and the evolution of the approaches taken by the team in its first four years to feed research findings back to study participants as the team began to move toward an integrated knowledge translation model.

Nursing Research Supplement

Knowledge Translation Research: Advances in Theory and Methods

Guest Editor: Alison L. Kitson

The purpose of this special supplement is to present a set of research papers by Carole Estabrooks and her team on the topic of research use in practice. Significantly, in addition to the original research papers, a number of leading researchers, scholars, and policy makers in the field of knowledge translation (KT) have been invited to address key elements that impact upon research developments in the area and to critique the work of Estabrooks et al.