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LPHI Publishes Research Ready Workbook to Prepare Healthcare Staff for Clinic-Based Research

More health research is happening in outpatient clinic settings. Moving studies into the regular clinical environment has two main advantages: it is more convenient for patients and the results provide a better understanding of how interventions work in real-world conditions.

Through its REACHnet initiative, LPHI has been helping to bring these clinic-based (pragmatic) studies to patients at healthcare organizations in Louisiana and Texas. To date organizations and funders involved with pragmatic research have (rightly) placed a lot of focus on engaging patients in the research process, from designing protocols to disseminating results. Less attention has been given to the experiences and perspectives of the clinic sites where pragmatic research is being implemented. Staff members, such as nurses and medical assistants, are often called upon to help with research activities but are not effectively engaged and oriented to research. Through our experiences implementing clinic-based research studies, LPHI recognized that clinic staff experience their own challenges and barriers to engaging with the research that happens at their workplaces.

In 2017, LPHI received a Eugene Washington Engagement Award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to learn more about clinic staff’s experience implementing pragmatic studies and to create tools to help foster their engagement in research. The first of these tools, a training workbook for clinic staff, is now available on our website. This training covers basic research principles as well as tips and strategies for staff members who will be supporting research studies at their workplaces. The workbook is designed to be used for self-guided study or as a compliment to facilitator-lead instruction.

The second tool, a guide for researchers planning to conduct clinic-based studies, will be published in the coming weeks and available on LPHI.org.

For more information, please contact Daniele Farrisi (dfarrisi@lphi.org).