PUBLIC LECTURE: UWA Albany Public Lecture

Scientific innovations and new knowledge often languish in academic journals or percolate within contained scientific communities, greatly limiting real world impacts they may have across many sectors, including health, education, and human services more generally. The last decade has seen an emergence of a new field of Implementation Science that aims to learn how best to share what we learn with varied audiences in hopes of attaining greater impacts. Sometimes, we aim to share what we learn to increase awareness or knowledge. We are also learning to improve how we share new discoveries with policy makers so that decisions impacting whole populations can be informed by good research evidence. Much of the time we look to how we can use research evidence to change behaviours, including how health professionals can incorporate services and treatments that are strongly supported by scientific evidence. However, changing what someone has been doing for many years can be rather complex and difficult, and that’s where implementation scientists lend their expertise. This lecture will review what we have learned so far in our journey of bringing research evidence to real world application, and identify what we have yet to learn.