A new research position at the University’s Center for Health Intervention and Prevention will help facilitate the translation of UConn evidence-based health interventions into practice.
The position, known as a “boundary spanner,” is part of CHIP’s increasing involvement in the Connecticut Institute for Clinical and Translational Science (CICATS) at UConn. It is one of three such positions in CICATS, and the only one at the Storrs campus.
Alicia Dugan, who has a Ph.D. in industrial and organizational psychology, was appointed to the new role in the fall.
“My work at CHIP is part of a larger initiative to advance the science of dissemination and implementation (D & I) at UConn,” says Dugan. “UConn’s emerging focus on D & I is based on an acknowledgment that, while researchers at UConn have developed a variety of evidence-based interventions to promote health and prevent disease, there is a sizable gap in getting these important interventions into the settings where they can truly affect health care quality and service delivery, such as health care practices, community organizations, and workplaces.
“A central part of my new role at CHIP is to gain a full understanding of the range of intervention research taking place at UConn,” she adds, “and to encourage D & I research through knowledge-sharing and the building of collaborative relationships between UConn researchers and community partners.”
The University created CICATS in partnership with regional hospitals, state agencies, and community health care organizations, to transform the way biomedical science is conceived, conducted, and disseminated in Connecticut. The Institute transcends the traditional boundaries of individual entities and organizes the University and its partners into a single functioning research consortium.
CICATS boundary spanners work across established organizational and disciplinary boundaries to help accomplish the University’s goal of translating its biomedical and health-related discoveries into products, policies, and practices that improve people’s health and quality of life, and to disseminate these discoveries into the community of physicians and healthcare providers throughout Connecticut and beyond.
“This position is critical in that it will encourage and facilitate dissemination and implementation activities among faculty at UConn, and link faculty who have developed effective health promotion interventions with partners – in the University, the community, the government, and industry – with whom they can disseminate them,” says Jeffrey Fisher, a professor of psychology and director of CHIP. “It will also encourage D & I research at UConn – an area with increased priority for government funding. Bridging the gap between science and practice is critical, and D & I research can help to bridge it.”
The goal is for CICATS to have a “boundary spanner” from each sphere of the CICATS system – the University, the public health sector, the community, etc. – work with its target groups and each other to bring into the CICATS partnership otherwise disconnected organizations, researchers, and community end users, who either have interventions that may be ripe for translation or who could benefit from the dissemination and implementation of UConn’s evidence-based health research.
According to UConn’s recent Clinical and Translational Science Awards application to the National Institutes of Health, CICATS boundary spanners will carry out a set of engagement activities that may include proactively identifying evidence-based interventions ready for dissemination, identifying innovative interventions requiring evaluation, and establishing linkages between projects and investigators. They will meet regularly to coordinate findings and to accelerate the process of discovery and linkage.
The boundary spanners are part of CICATS’ Community Engagement Core.
