Table of Contents
Introduction to Creating and Documenting Clinical Impact
Please note: The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Slide 1:Hello, thanks for choosing to participate in this unit called Creating and Documenting Clinical Impact.My name is Trina Spencer and I’m the chair of the Committee for Clinical Research Implementation Science and Evidence Based Practice or CRISP for short.
Slide 2:Let me take a minute to introduce our committee, we are a collaborative group that shares an enthusiasm for transferring clinical research to evidence-based practice and promoting sustained implementation of effective practices.We are thrilled that we have the opportunity to get you excited about clinical research too. I am an intervention and implementation researcher in the area of child language at the Right Path Research and Innovation Center, University of South Florida.Natalie Douglas is an implementation scientist at Central Michigan University. She works to support communication and other outcomes for people with dementia living in nursing homes.Meredith Harold is the owner of The Informed SLP a website that connects clinicians and scientists with each other. She’s a full-time science communicator.Nidhi Mahendra is a clinical researcher at San Jose State University who specializes in cognitive communication disorders as well as Diversity and Equity issues.Nanette Nicholson is an audiologist and clinical researcher at Nova Southeastern University with expertise in the areas of early Hearing Detection and intervention family support and inner professional education.Sarah Wallace conducts clinical research in the areas of aphasia, and augmentative and alternative communication at Duquesne University.Meghan Davis sorry Davison is a clinical researcher in autism spectrum disorders and child language at University of Kansas.And Sherri Smith is an audiologist and clinical researcher who studies hearing loss and older adults in the department of head and neck surgery and in communication sciences at Duke University.
Slide 3:The CRISP committee has been charged with monitoring challenges and opportunities in communication science and disorders.Regarding clinical practice implementation science knowledge translation and of course evidence based practice.Did you know that only 25% of ASHAs publications fall into the category of clinical practice research and only 1% address implementation?
Slide 4:This poses a huge challenge for practitioners and the faculty who train them. The lack of clinical practice research readily available to practicing SLPs and audiologists is a barrier to evidence-based practice.Because it’s our job to help fix this, we have reflected upon some of the possible roadblocks.
Slide 5:These include clinical research may not be accessible to practitioners. Clinical researchers may not know how to engage practitioners and clinical research may be undervalued in academia.
Slide 6:We wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t also reflect on the opportunity that these roadblocks present, we have the chance to increase clinical practice research and make it readily available to practicing SLPs and audiologists. Our goal is to encourage more clinical research improve its accessibility for practitioners and make sure that researchers are acknowledged for the impact they make in practice.
Slide 7:In this clinical impact unit you will hear from a number of people on our committee and others who have some experience with this.You don’t have to view the segments in any particular order. But if you do, this is a good order first Meredith, who is our resident social media expert starts off with a good topic, Creating Impact through Social Media.Building off of Meredith’s content, Nidhi, Meghan and Nannette present, five steps for beginners, making it easy to get started.Then Natalie explains what a knowledge broker is and how one might help you increase your impact. She also interviews two full time knowledge brokers, Ianessa Humbert and Meredith Harold. Next, Sherri compares Impact metrics across academia and outside of academia. Finally, Sarah and I lead a panel discussion.We invited some smart clinical researchers to talk about their experiences, creating and documenting impact if you’re ready. Get started.
Creating Impact: Where Do We Start
Please note: The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Slide 1: Hi everyone this is Meredith Harold and I’m here to briefly talk to you about getting started with Creating Impact with your research.
Slide 2: So there’s been increased conversation within the last decade, and probably participate, particularly within the last five years. Around ensuring that scientists, there’s that science reach reaches the relevant stakeholders. So within academia, there’s been a lot more conversation around; How do we create impact? How do we make sure that people know about science? How do we make sure that people know about science in a timely fashion? And how do we make sure they know how to use it, implement it, and how do we ensure that our science creates the better world that most of us are kind of aiming for with a lot of our work?So expectations and opportunities to engage with external audiences are higher, more widespread than they have ever previously been and most of you who are here. I would say are somewhat ready to start creating impact. I would say most scientists want to see it happen.And some scientists are ready to start getting involved. So this portion of the lecture is going to be chatting with you about how to get started if you’re wanting to get involved.The first few questions that people usually have are. Where do I go? like, where do I go to create impact, either in person or online?How do I do it once I get there? like, once I arrived on Twitter. What am I supposed to do? and is it working? So once you start trying to create impact. How do you know if you’re doing a good job? How do you know if you’re making a difference? How do you know if you’re creating impact?
Slide 3:So for the, where do you go question. There’s a lot of places you can go soSocial media and forums. So, places like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit. Tick Tock. The ASHA SIG forums.And there’s probably even some that I’ve left off of there. And quite frankly, within the next year to three years there will be even more there. Tick Tock, for example, at the beginning of 2020Wasn’t a very relevant place for science communication. Now it’s an extremely relevant place for science communication as we’re approaching the end of 2020 and a lot of SLPs are doing communication about our field on there as well.And it’s important to note that as you look at all these options. There’s two factors that you want to take into consideration.One is your own personal preferences and level of comfort. So if you’re someone who loves Twitter, but doesn’t use any of these otherSocial media platforms or forums, then you should probably stick with Twitter, at least for a little while.And you’re going to be a lot more successful if you go to places that you’re comfortable in. And if you go to places that you enjoy because once you start trying to have conversations with people around science. If they perceive it to be a chore for you or unenjoyable for you. It’s not going to go over very well anyway. So think about yourself. Think about where you want to be and where you want to be having conversations. That being said, it also is important if you’re trying to genuinely create widespread impact with the highest numbers possible. Once you get comfortable with doing some of this, it will be important for you to figure out where your audience lives too. So, for example, most SLPs are white females.SLPs tend to hang out on Instagram. So if I was looking across all these social media platforms. And if I wanted to prioritize one of them purely because that’s where the most SLPs are, I would be going to Instagram and Facebook, however, that being said, if you don’t like Instagram, you will definitely want to start with your science communication on Instagram. So it’s kind of a given take between what you want and where your audience hangs out. Now, there’s a lot ofresearch and data available about who hangs out where at that’s, you know, separated out bygender and age and even topic, for example, Twitter is really active for political science, even though it’s not very active for other topics.And I wouldn’t necessarily recommend going and doing a ton of research about where people hang out.Instead, you can just ask your target audience. So if you’re trying to communicate with SLPs if they’re the main people you want to reach, then just ask SLPs were SLPs hang out because they know. Or say your target audience is parents of children under the age of five. The best way to figure out where parents of children under the age of five like to hang out online is to just ask them to ask them where they’re making contact with people who are in similar situations to them.In addition to social media and forums online. There’s also an in-person options so conferences local international online and I, there’s a lot of people who aim to make the greatest impact within their own city, rather than at a morewider scale either nationally or internationally. So think about it that matters to you too. And if that matters to you and say your excuse me.Say your target audience is again. Parents of children under the age of five. You might want to hang out or you might want to figure out where new parents meet each other and hang out with one another. For example, in my city, there’s a lot of parents have multiples meetups where parents have twins, triplets, quadruplets etc all get together and brainstorm about you know how to best support their children.There’s first year baby meetups where parents will meet other parents locally to try to learn from one another soI, for example, have done lectures to parent groups within my city, and in situations in which I’m particularly trying to reach parents of children.And there’s also, in addition to lecture options. There’s websites and blogs and so sometimes people will set up their own website and communicate that way.Sometimes people won’t set up their own website at all and that instead will only communicate through other people’s websites by doing guest blog posts. So that’s another way to tackle it too is to think, you know, whose website could I go visit and offer to lecture on their website or offer to write a blog post on their website that’s another option as well; Local News local gatherings. In general, though as you start to think of all the places where you could make contact with people because that’s really all this is is where are people?And specifically, where are the specific types of people who I’m wanting to make contact with? Where are they hanging out? and you just go where the people are and it’s also worth noting to that if you try to tackle too many places at once, it’s probably going to be excruciating. So I would definitely recommend if you’re new to science communication or trying to create impact with your research to start with just one place one on line location or one in person location and get comfortable with that before you move on to other options.
Slide 4:Then once you get there. The question is, how do you do it? So once you show up in a place like Twitter and say to yourself. You know, I want to talk more about the science that I know the science that I love my own science my field science. How do you do it once you get there?And science communication really is just marketing its marketing with science as the topic.And those of you who have a science background, who are viewing this lecture, which I assume is probably going to be most folks, you already have that down. You understand the content and so you’re going to be at an advantage compared to, for example, journalists who are just newly starting to cover science topics. So the topic is going to be the easy part for you. The harder part for you is going to be the marketing part. And and a lot of times when I say this to scientists that basically they have to learn to be good marketers if they’re going to do impact work, a lot of times I get immediate pushback where they’re likeI’m not a marketer, like I that’s not my thing. I am not interested in that, in no way do I view myself as a marketer or see myself becoming someone who knows marketing.And that I would encourage you to think of marketing much more broadly. And because I guarantee any of you who have jobs are already doing versions of marketing. So like a scientist who’s employed a university, for example.Every time you’re getting course evaluation feedback and you’re trying to makeadjustments to your course in order for the students to have a better learning experience, the brainstorming and problem solving that you’re going through is a version of marketing, because basically what you’re asking yourself is,How do I get the students to be more excited about this? or how do I get the students to understand why this is important?How do I get the students to enjoy it better? How do I get them to want to beself-motivated by the content in a way that I don’t have to tell them what to do and force them through things, but they’re actually motivated to tackle problems on their own?All of those are marketing problems and also, when you go to conferences to present science and you’re standing up on the stage and you look out into the audience.And you’re trying to kind of figure out who’s there and maybe in some lectures. You’re like, oh, most of this audience is actually scientists. I know everybody who’s sitting here or you look out into the audience and say to yourself, ohI don’t recognize anybody from my, you know, science world and area of expertise. I’m thinking, most of these people who have showed up here, our clinicians. When you look at your audience. And notice, things like that. You should and likely are making changes to the way you’re talking to them because there’s going to be things that fellow scientists care more about and there’s going to be things that fellow clinicians care more about and you’ll probably make really quick adjustments to the way you speak to the audience, based on that.That is marketing. What you’re doing is trying to figure out how to make sure your message, message resonates with the people who are in the audience.Another huge one is grant proposals, every time you write a grant proposal you are incorporating, incorporating principles of marketing within your written work.More than likely, most of you in the audience have never been trained and marketing.And but I’m a full-time science communicator and I haven’t been trained in marketing either. But the reason I bring it up is because once you get started, not before you get started, but once you get started. If you’re trying to figure out how to get better where you get to the point where you thinkOkay, you know, I’m reaching people this is resonating with folks, but I want it to go further, I want the impact to be bigger. I want to go deeper.The place where you’re going to need to go in order to problem solve, what you need to adjust what you need to tweak and what you might be doing wrong is marketing.Okay, whether that’s in the forms of books, blogs, websites, whatever. So start to think of your impact work as a version of marketing so that you know how to problem solve. Once you hit barriers as you go along.
Slide 5:All right then, how do you know if it’s working ? well, this is kind of an interesting question because now that impact and, you know, broad community impact stakeholder impact worldwide impact is starting to take more of a front seat in priorities that are centered around, you know, science and science funding even and we really don’t know the best way to measure, most of it. Attempts to put widespread guidelines as to how to measure it in place. Mostly don’t work. That would be similar to looking at all science and trying to put guidelines in place as to, you know how to measure the data that you’re correct collecting with you and your science.It’s so nuanced and specific to what it is that you’re doing that for the most part it’s an individual problem solving thing, trying to figure out how to measure it, more so than saying, oh, make sure to look for this, make sure to look for that measure this way, you know, run your stats that way so broadly, what you’re looking for is some sort of measure of social significance.Is understanding, awareness, culture, attitude, policy, and economic factors are any of these things changing in any way. And can you find a way to measure that changevia your work the other tricky thing about it too with impact work is a lot of times you can’t measure it.You might feel like it’s working. And you might be observing a lot of conversations with folks about how it’s working. But figuring out how to truly measure the impact that you’re having is a long-haul thing. This is something that will take years, if not decades to figure out good ways to measure it. You’re also going to want to look at reach. So are you making contact with more people over time? like the first time you try or you may be getting about 10 people engaged in a conversation around a scientific topic? And then the next time you try, you get more and more and more people engaged in these conversations. This is really easy to measure on social media, which is a lot of times why social media is people’s preferred method of or one of their preferred methods of doing science communication and so start to measure whether or not your reach is either changing and finding the right people are increasing over time.And you can also go through other people. Another really important thing is to ensure that you’re making contact with knowledge brokers. So knowledge brokers are people who are going to be able to carry your message for you.And I won’t go too in depth into the concept of knowledge. Knowledge brokers here because Natalie Douglas will be discussing it later in this series of lectures.But the one thing I do want to emphasize is that you don’t need to plan exactly how you’re going to measure things before you get started, you need to start then see what data is available to you. And then with future iterations, figure out how to measure it in a more savvy way and in an increasingly savvy way because usually you won’t know what type of data you have available. If you’re not familiar with the medium you’re working with them.
Slide 6: So, um, science communication and making the choice to attempt to create greater impact with your research is definitely a leap now PLAN LATER type of thing and that’s the thing that I noticed most frequently in my science colleagues who’ve never done this before.Is if they’ve never done it before they want to spend a ton of time planning, like where am I going to go? what am I going to say? How am I going to measure it? how will I know if it’s working? What will I do next? what are the, you know,12 steps? The 20 steps? The 40 steps? I’m going to take in order to reach this end goal.In some planning is good, of course, but usually it’s a lot better to just do it.Because most people have absolutely no idea what is and isn’t going to work until they start trying. Most people have no idea what their strengths and weaknesses are. When it comes to science communication.A lot of people are naturally good at certain things and don’t even realize that until they start trying to do it. And so I highly encourage you to leap now and plan or pivot later.On the upcoming slides I’m going to give you a basic checklist of things that you could ask yourself in order to figure out whether or not you’re ready to leap.I would say that most of you are ready to leap. This week, like you’re ready to leap right now. You just don’t know it yet. So let’s see if I can convince you of that.
Slide 7:Alright, so usually spending just a little time thinking or brain storming and then just jumping right in is the best strategy. Here are some of the things you’re going to want to think through. First, and who do I want to share the information with? or communicate with so the whole wide world doesn’t need to know about your science. And if you’re someone who is studying, you know,cochlear implants and young children and and you know outcomes over the first few years after they get cochlear implants, like the whole world isn’t your audience, you might need to actually be starting with the parents of children who’ve received cochlear implants. And so one of your first things that you’re going to be asking yourself is,All right, who are these people? And once you’ve defined who they are like the people you most need to communicate with then you’ll have to start figuring out kind of where they are and where they hang out and but you’ve got to identify relevant stakeholders. Most of the times, it works best to identify a small group of relevant stakeholders first and then expand. Because again, like if you’re doing cochlear implant research, you might, in the long term, have a goal of reaching everybody helping everybody at least a little bit better understand what cochlear implants are. But you don’t want to start with reaching everybody, you’ve got an end your communication strategy is going to vary substantially by who it is you’re trying to reach and what it is you’re trying to tell them so identify who your audiences. First, the who question.Then you want to figure out where they hang out. They may hang hang out in all sorts of different places. And if you don’t know where they hang out.Then you don’t know them well enough yet. So that’s going to be another thing that you’ve got to sort of figure out is you need to start having conversations with the people who you’re trying to reach so that you know them well enough that you have some idea of where they hang out.And then you can interview and converse with them in order to get a better idea of where they hang out. This is something that’s just going to be conversation based you need to just talk to people in order to figure out where you can reach them.Then you need to make sure that you know what they want. So what does they want, not what to you want, but what did they want. So you need to start from what they want and then work backwards toward your needs and what you can provide. And this is another common thing that gets better and better over time because when you start telling people about the science that you know is going to be valuable to them, most people attack it from what they think about the science and what they think is important about it, rather than attacking it from what the audience thinks is important about it.But it requires knowing your audience in order to be able to predict what they’re going to want to hear and the way they’re going to want to hear it. So this will be something that improves as you continue to communicate with your audience. So don’t worry too much about getting it wrong from the get go. You just need to start having these conversations so that you know what they want.And then you need to ask, how can I help? so you’re only valuable to your audience if you can help them or entertain them. You don’t need to be entertaining. I’m not someone who finds myself entertaining but I am someone who likes to help and so everybody’s going to have different strengths and streaks strengths and weaknesses and when it comes to figuring out how to provide value to fellow human beings. Some people are going to be highly entertaining and their science communication and that’s what makes them go viral.Other people are going to be just plain helpful in their science communication and that’s what makes them go viral. But for the most part, you’re going to either need to be helping people or keeping their attention, keeping them entertained somehow. And then what do you have to offer. And if you have something of value to offer you will be able to make an impact. So if you’re sitting here sayingOh this, you know, science that I’ve been working on for you know years or the science that me and my colleagues have been working on for decades, it’s so valuable to this audience. They just have to know about it. If that’s true, you will be able to make an impact. And if you go out and try to start sharing it, and you don’t see evidence of people caring, it means that you still just need to figure out what they want? where they are? how to communicate with them? So it’s going to be a learning process over time. But you’ve got to start by just giving it a try.And then I think that the best audit for your readiness is to ask yourself why you’re doing this?So just set real quick and say, Why am I doing this? like, why am I here listening to this lecture by Meredith? Why am I sitting here listening to this whole lecture by the CRISP community?And why am I wanting to add this to my already too busy to do list? And start to figure out what your reasons for why are. And then once you articulate those, you need to make sure that at least some of them are shared values with your audience.Now here’s what I mean by that. If I say, Why are you doing this? And you say, well, because I need to make sure that people see my research.That’s not something your audience cares about the only people who care about, you know, the metrics of your reach. And whether or not lots of people downloaded your journal article and whether or not. Lots of people are talking about it on Twitter. The only people who actually care about that is you. Maybe your partner if you’re lucky I’m not sure my partner cares about that.Maybe your mom or your dad or your best friend if you’re lucky, but really, nobody cares about that, but you. So those are the type of things where it’s okay to care about that. And it’s okay to have that on your why list but you need to figure out what your other whys are too. What are the other reasons that you want to share your research that are actually identical to your audience’s reasons the reasons that they want you to show up for them? So, um, maybe you know it’s a parent of a child with language disorders, who just wants their kid to, you know, get better faster. They want their language skills to be good enough.That it’s no longer a barrier in social situations, but it’s no longer a barrier and academic situations or if it’s still going to be a barrier at least figure out ways to you know, improve it and get better and better over time. You’ve got to figure out what your audience cares about and figure out how they would describe it to because they’re not going to use the same words you do as to why this problem needs solved.So figure out those places where you and your audience overlap and what you care about. And those places where you overlap is the place that you need to be coming from when you start to do this science communication work. So you need to be able to articulate your shared values.And you need to constantly be coming from that place, because if you do your audience will find you extremely valuable and they’ll love that you’re showing up and helping them.
Slide 8:Okay, so, um, the time is now.And if now it doesn’t work. That’s okay. Maybe the time is next month, maybe the time is the month after that. But honestly, if you can fairly confidently, or at least somewhat answer the questions on that last slide, you’re ready to just start. You don’t need to plan anymore. You just need to start trying. Because through the process of trying, you’re going to get the data that you need in order to know what to do. Otherwise, you don’t have any data yet. You have no idea what to do until you start by trying. There’s also not very much that you can mess up by doing It Wrong. Because doing it wrong. Usually just means that not many people saw you reaching out, not many people responded to you reaching out and so it was just kind of a flop in that regard, where you’re kind of talking to a room with not very many people in it. Right. Um, but that doesn’t hurt anything. And you’ll have more problems by just not starting at all or over planning.
Slide 9:: Okay. And then once you start then you’ll be able to look at the data and figure out your own unique pain points because everybody’s going to have different pain points depending on what it is they’re trying to communicate and with who. And if you’re not creating impact, but you’re certain you have something of value where you’re like, I know this is useful to people I know this can change, change people’s lives.You know, make their everyday life better make their long term life better, but nobody’s picking up on it or seeing it or caring about it.And then it doesn’t mean that you’re doing something wrong. If you have something of value and it’s not and you’re not able to create an impact when you go try to share it.And it doesmean that you’re doing something wrong. However, I think it’s really important that you from the get go, recognize that it’s a strategy problem, not a you problem. So it’s not a reflection on you as a person.And not a reflection on your skill set. Instead, if you go out there, try to create impact and it falls flat, it’s just a problem to solve.It means that there’s some little tweak that needs made in order to resonate more with people or in order to make sure that you’re putting your information in the right place.And in order to make sure it looks the way it needs to look. It’s just a problem-solving thing. So don’t quit just if just because if once you start trying it doesn’t go over well.It’s not supposed to go over well when you first start trying. It’s supposed to be hard and it’s supposed to take a lot of time in order to figure out how to make it easy, where it’s just an easy thing that naturally happens for you.
Slide 10:So some of the reasons why you might try and end up with a pretty low impact.Like social media campaign, even though you thought that it would do really well. One reason can be the algorithm. So here’s what I mean by that.Social media platforms have stuff that’s running in the background that basically either pushes things up so that more people see it or pushes things down so that fewer people see that.The purpose of these algorithms is to basically increase the pleasurable experience of the viewer and also to allow for advertising to insert into there.So that whoever owns the social media platform makes money right. And you don’t need to know a lot about the algorithm. But you do need to be aware that things posted an all locations aren’t the same. So here’s a very explicit example of what I mean by that.When I first started doing science communication work through The Informed SLP, we had a Facebook page.And every time we posted something on the Facebook page hundreds if not thousands of people would see it every single time no matter what. That’s because when we started about three, four years ago.Facebook’s algorithm allowed for people to see the information from pages they follow. So when somebody followed a page, it would show up on their newsfeed so when they’re scrolling through Facebook, they would see announcements or bits of information from pages.And they would also see information from friends and stuff like that. All that mixed in. Right.But about. Let’s see. I’M ESTIMATING off the top of my head right now. I think it was about a year and a half ago, maybe two years.Facebook did a huge overhaul to their algorithm that way devalued pages and increase the value of Facebook groups.So instantaneously. We saw a massive drop in traffic where we could talk about a topic and hundreds of people were seeing it before and now all of a sudden like 15 people are seeing it.That’s not because we immediately started to do a terrible job, it’s because of the change and the Facebook algorithm. So just be aware that you’re pushing up against this. A lot of times, so, um, it would behoove you to just have conversations with people who are heavy users of a platform that you’re trying to exist within such as Facebook because they almost always know whatwhat type types of things tend to be seen. So now if we want things to be seen. We need to put it in Facebook groups instead. And now if we want things to be seen. It can’t be me who owns The Informed SLP posting about it because Facebook knows that I own The Informed SLP and if I post anything through our own platform it devalues it because it assumes that I’m trying to basically advertise to people.And so we have to figure out ways around that as well. So you’re always going to be pushing up against that. If you’re on social media and you need to have some general idea of how things get seen by people so that you’re putting things on the right place because it because one location versus another and how you’re saying it and who say says it makes a huge difference.Sometimes it’s what you’re saying. Sometimes it’s the case that the way you’re saying something doesn’t resonate with your audience because you don’t use the same language, they do. So you can get feedback on this by just asking people who are examples of your target audience. So like if your target audience is school based SLPs, have some school based SLPs look at what you’re doing and ask them for truly constructive feedback say to them, hey, I’ve been posting about this topic and nobody seems interested in it and I don’t understand why I need you to tell me why I need you to tell me where I’m failing and encourage them to give you highly critical feedback so that you can see what it is that you’re messing up there.And oh, well, the next one says, is it how I’m saying it. Sometimes it’s the topic. Sometimes it’s the way you’re saying it. Sometimes it’s how it looks and some people focus more on the text of things. Most people focus heavily on the way things look though literally just the way it’s designed. And there should be people around you that you can lean on in order to help you get your design skills adequate enough that it looks good enough that design isn’t a barrier.Things don’t need to be beautiful. You don’t need to be a graphic designer. I’m not a graphic designer and I mean heck, three years ago, I couldn’t tell the difference between two different styles of fonts, it required me leaning on people around me to help tell me when things looked good versus not good.So sometimes it’s that sometimes everything you’re saying is right, but just looks bad. And sometimes it’s who you’re talking to. Sometimes you haven’t actuallycorrectly identified your target audience or you haven’t narrowed your target audience enough. For example, if you think your target audiences SLPs and it might not be. It might be more specifically, you know, met SLPs or pediatric SLPs and you just need to narrow that down.When in doubt, though. Ask your audience that people who you’re talking to, are going to give you much better feedback than anyone else could because they know how they’re perceiving things when you’re giving them information.
Slide 11:Okay. So in general, when you’re starting to try to create impact. Just keep in mind that all it is is that people thing and a communication thing.All you’re doing is communicating with people, you’re just trying to figure out the best place to do it, who the right people are how to structure your message.In order to make that communication productive in general meaningful connections with people leads to impact people want to feel connected to whoever or whatever it is that sharing information with them.However, you don’t have to be a people person or extrovert, just like I said several slides ago that a lot of times, marketing is off putting to people were scientists are like, No, no, I don’t do that stuff. I don’t do that.And this whole concept of it being a people thing and a communication thing is often also off putting to some people, where if they view themselves as an introvert or not a big people person. They think they won’t be able to do it, but I’m telling you right now. It makes no difference whatsoever. I consider myself to be primarily an introvert, who can just pretend to be extroverted sometimes and it’s not a problem for me at all.The thing that makes it not a problem is because I care about the message and I care about getting the message out to people. And so I find ways to communicate with people that are comfortable to me.So comfortable to me. A lot of times is like social media locations, for example, so you don’t need to be a people person. You don’t need to be an extrovert.You just need to care about what it is that you’re trying to do. And that’s going to come through.And you do, though, have to be able to look at the behavior of people around you and adjust your actions based on their responses.So this is going to be a back and forth thing. It’s not a you standing on stage, pushing things out to people walking away and hoping it goes over well type of thing. Instead, you have to be interested and in observing and looking into how people are responding and then you’re going to grow when you’re able to make adjustments based on that.And in general, you know, just ask. What do you have to offer the world through your research?You probably wouldn’t be doing it. If you didn’t think it wasn’t important. I would argue that every scientist working within our field is doing something extremely important to the world.And so you have a lot to offer. So it’s time to just figure out ways to go, share it or connect with people who are ready to share it for you to make sure that all the hard work that you’re doing and the science that you’re doing reaches as many people and as makes a difference and as many lives as possible. So good luck and have fun.
Clinical Impact for Beginners
Please note: The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Slide 1:Meghan Davidson: This presentation is about the five basic steps that a beginner can take to increase their impact.
Slide 2:Before we get into the five steps. Let me give you a quick reminder of what and why increasing impact is relevant to you.One way to increase impact this is share work with fellow researchers, which is definitely important. But only sharing our work with other researchers means that we exist in a research bubble. Now, especially relevant to our clinical field is that not sharing information outside of this research bubble limits are real world impact, whether that is on people’s lives public policy culture public services and the economy.Now, many, if not all, researchers desire for their work to have this kind of impact, but it takes some intentionality.Now, in addition to having broad impact. Why would you want to go to this effort of sharing your work outside of the research bubble? Sharing your work has the potential to lead to new opportunities, improve your skills and confidence enrich your job performance and make your research relevant.All together, this results in personal, professional an external validation.
Slide 3:The first step to increasing the impact of your work is to identify your goal. We recommend doing this for specific projects that you are working on.At least as a step to begin. So as an example, you might say, I wish more clinicians knew the data about how to treat stuttering in school aged children.Presumably you have a specific project on stuttering and school aged children that you would like for clinicians to know about. And this is a great goal for your first step.Now let’s listen in on a recent conversation that Nannette and I had about our goals for clinical impact impact before we move on to step two.
Slide 4/Video: Nannette: Hi Meghan could you share your clinical impact goal with me?
Meghan: Yeah hey Nannette. I would love to. My clinical impact goal is to share the results with clinicians of a recent review that I did on reading comprehension in school aged children with autism. What about you, do you have a recent clinical impact goal?
Nannette: I do mine is to share the results of a recent presentation that I did about family support with professionals who work with families of children with hearing loss. And then also to share it with the families who have children with hearing loss.
Meghan: Excellent. Yeah, that sounds like it would be really important to get out there.
Nannette: So do you have any ideas about where or how you might share this information?
Meghan: Yeah, I was thinking that, given that there are a lot of speech language pathologists on Instagram that I would share it through my lab Instagram account.
Nannette: Okay, sounds like that would be a great venue.
Meghan: Yeah. What about you, have you thought about where you would like to share it?
Nannette: I have been thinking about it. And I thought, probably Facebook might be a good place to start. I belong to a couple different groups. One of pediatric audiologists and I think they might be interested. And then I think it’s also important for families of children with hearing loss to have the information too.
Meghan: Yeah, that sounds like a great venue. Alright, thanks for sharing.
Nannette: Thank you.
Slide 5:Meghan: In that conversation,you heard Nannette and I talked about our clinical impact goals for our recent projects and then we discussed our initial thoughts. Behind where we wanted to share her information. So this leads into step two, where you want to identify your target audience. And match it to a platform where you will find individuals from that target audience. For example, if you are working on a project and say to yourself, I’d like to get feedback on this research. I wonder what platform aphasia researchers use where I could get this feedback?
Slide 6:There are many potential platforms to choose from for your audience this list of platforms is not exhaustive. But for example, if your goal targets researchers, you might consider Twitter a lab or personal website.ResearchGate or LinkedIn as platforms for your goal and audience if you wish to share with clinicians then Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok or LinkedIn, maybe the best platforms to choose from.Finally, if patients and or families or your target audience, then you may choose between Facebook, Instagram, a lab or personal website SnapChat or TikTok. When you are just beginning, just choose the one platform that will work best for you that reaches your target audience.
Slide 7:Once you have decided on your goal audience and platform. Then in Step three, look at what other people are doing for your target audience on the platform that you chose. You will want to see what several different users are already doing in order to identify what will work best for you.Don’t worry if you are not sure how to do everything that someone else is doing. You learn over time.Just pick one thing that you see as an example and give it a try to start. You can learn more later. Consider examples across users that resonate with you and best match your topic, your goals and your audience.
Slide 8:To get you started, we’ve listed here a few examples of communication sciences and disorders, researchers using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to increase their clinical impact.
Slide 9:Now in step four is time to create some content you want to think in small bits that will make it stick. Some ideas are to use pictures, infographics, or videos. You could also post a take home message, money statement or important quote. You could maybe ask a provocative question. You also might want to think about sharing your work or others work that is related to your own. Another option is to share brief narratives about your work, accomplishments, products or study flyers.
Slide 10:There are a million ways to create content. And these are just a few examples to get you started on Twitter @TrinaDSpencer2 uses infographics to share her study key points and @dr_deglutition illustrates important concepts through images.
Slide 11:On Facebook @KUwordlearning creates engaging visual content with a clear take home message in the image with additional supporting text and @Jackie_Davie shares a video related to new simulation software.
Slide 12:Finally, on Instagram @ei.northwestern uses article information in her image with supporting text to describe the key results of this review.These are just a few examples of how different researchers have approached sharing their research more widely. If you’re interested in learning more about how researchers like these engaged clinicians and families, check out the CRISP committee’s panel discussion on clinical impact.
Slide 13:The last step in increasing impact for beginners is to share information, make posts and track outcomes. Here’s Dr Nidhi Mahendra has example of a cross platform comparison that she did to see where she was making the most impact.
Slide 14:Nidhi Mahendra: Thank you, Meghan this last step five is where you now test drive one or more social media platforms to share about your work. This certainly connects right back to your goals in the first place. And in a true spirit of being evidence based and beta guided, you’re going to want to monitor what response. You’re getting to the content or information you’re sharing. Another aspect, you may be in more traditional platforms and social media platforms for dissemination. Let me share some examples.
Slide 15:To give you some background. This was an article published and an ASHA journal in April 2019. This article is in the vein of scholarship of teaching and learning or so to on the inclusion of LGBTQ issues and relevant topics into the multicultural curriculum in speech pathology and the diversity issue scores.My interest was in documenting learner perceptions to this instructional module, as well as to study the efficacy of instructional strategies that were used.Looking at some traditional metrics from the ASHA journal website. You can see on the bottom right hand of the slide that this article was cited two times and downloaded 389 times in a one-year timeframe.I wanted to see what outcomes would result if I tweeted a post about this article with a screenshot and some narrative context about the work. Let’s take a look.
Slide 16:So I tweeted about this article using a screenshot of the article as a link image a direct link to the article and a 280 character personalized narrative about how this work was inspired and motivated by the experiences of LGBTQ identified colleagues and students.I went on to track the analytics for this tweet over 30 days now Twitter’s analytics revealed that my tweet was viewed nearly 2,500 times with 337 more substantive engagements.On the right half of the screen right now. You can see the details provided to me by Twitter analytics.And engagements, as defined them Twitter include how many times the details of the tweet were expanded, how many clicks resulted in the media on the tweet, comments, likes retweets and profile clicks on the person posting the tweet.Doing this type of comparison between a traditional platform like a journal website versus a social media platform, reveals in this instance that social media has enormous dissemination power and related impact in a much shorter interval of time compared to what happens on a traditional journal website.Now let me give you another example.
Slide 17: This is an example of some other type of work that you may produce as a clinician, researcher or scholar and how you might compare between two different social media platforms.In this example, I shared an OpEd on to social media platforms that Meghan was just telling us about ResearchGate and LinkedIn.This OpEd was published in September 2020 and its focus or goal was to raise awareness about aphasia, communication Disorders and the important work that speech pathologists do and the related critical shortage of speech language pathologists in the state of California. So what I did was to compare what would happen if I shared information about this OpEd on ResearchGate and on LinkedIn.In the same 30-day time frame, I was able to see that the article was read four times on ResearchGate and generated two comments.On the other hand, on linked in my Op Ed was read over 1,200 times generating 52 likes and five comments.Such comparison reveals that in this example this content was disseminated with much more impact or more effectively on LinkedIn and better served the original intention of raising awareness about aphasia communication disorders and the role of speech language pathologists.
Slide 18:In summary, we hope that you found this presentation useful and that it encourages you to embark on your own journey to enhance your impact using social media.We’d like to end with summarizing your five steps to increase in clinical impact which are to identify your goals, to determine your audience and platform, to study other posts as examples, to curate content to highlight key information and to share and track your own impact. Explore, have fun and remember that the journey of 1,000 Miles starts with a single step. Good luck.
Knowledge Brokers
Please note: The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Slide 1: Hi there. Good afternoon. My name is Natalie Douglas of the CRISP committee and I am here today to talk with you a little bit about knowledge brokers.
Slide 2:So when we have this rather philosophical question of what is knowledge. There are clearly a lot of places a lot of roads, we could go down, if you will.
Slide 3:So a Google Scholar search of scientific knowledge actually yields well over 5 million results.And it is way outside of the scope of this clinical impact module for us to get into a discussion about what is true knowledge, but we at the same time, want to encourage our viewers to rely on scientific inquiry. Right. We know how to work this scientific method. So when we’re thinking about describing, explaining, predicting, and intervening on variables. We know what this is. We know where to get scientific knowledge.
Slide 4: And any discussion about scientific knowledge would not really be complete without at least a mention of pseudoscience. Okay, so when we’re thinking about pseudoscience. We’re thinking about a scenario where pseudoscience is really seeking confirmation of a particular claim about either a product or an intervention or something of that nature, whereas science is going to come at that fromalmost the opposite angle where science is going to set upan experiment to challenge it’s claims in to actually look for evidence that might prove it false, right. So you see here pseudoscience is seeking confirmation and science is seeking falsification. And we know this, right, we get this.
Slide 5: So we talked about knowledge, a little bit.
Slide 6: What is a broker? Okay, so if we were to get a dictionary definition of broker. Okay, we’re talking about somebody who acts as an intermediary, and that is essentially what a knowledge broker is so when you think about a typical broker. These are people like an agent or somebody who’s going to negotiate a contract kind of the middle person going in between, right. So when we think about a knowledge broker,
Slide 7: we are thinking about somebody who might be known as a facilitator, maybe a coach, a consultant, a technical assistant.
Slide 8: But interestingly, there’s actually a very robust literature base about what knowledge brokers and who knowledge brokers are so these are professionals who connect people on both sides of a boundary. So when we’re thinking about a boundary, we’re thinking about research, clinical practice and our knowledge brokers are people who can make that connection because they see both sides of a boundary. So they’re able to facilitate that knowledge exchange between the different worlds.
Slide 9: Knowledge brokers also are able to distinguish between the scientific knowledge held by researchers and the very practical knowledge of how to do things.
Slide 10: Knowledge brokers are people who make knowledge readily accessible and useful to individuals and groups by developing ways to work collaboratively or to work together.
Slide 11: So who are these knowledge brokers in communication sciences and disorders? Right. The interesting thing is you may not have thought of them with this lens. But it turns out that we have quite a few.
Slide 12: So when we think about our field in terms of how are we going to connect research and clinical practice? Right.We’re thinking about this concept of a knowledge broker. So I would love us for to think about businesses, social media influencers, podcast hosts, and maybe even you as a clinical researcher as knowledge brokers in our field.
Slide 13: So the first example that I want to share with you is that have a business. So this is TactusTherapy owned by Megan Sutton.And what she has designed our applications that are based on evidence for people with aphasia. And what you can see from her website here is that she is taking evidence
Slide 14: And she is translating it into very digestible formats such as handouts, guides for both families and clinicians and Megan is one who on a regular basis is truly interacting with both the scientific and the clinical communities.So she’s really letting knowledge from both of those sides influence her business and influence her work and you can really see as you go through her products that she highly values science and evidence based practice.
Slide 15: Another example would be a social media influencer, so this is Kimberly Santo and she is a person who has a lot of influence in the pediatric language community. So she is a personwho every single week is pulling the best of the research and directing clinicians to that research as well as her own website.
Slide 16: So you can see on her website that you’ve got digestible formats simplified messaging, but it’s still the science right this is not pseudoscience. She’s diving into that literature and interacting with both worlds.
Slide 17: Another example here is we’ve got Becky from the SLT Scrapbook website so she is often discussing best practices and research in earlier in early intervention.But she is interesting because she’s providing citations of the research within her products. So she is actually directing people and clinicians to the research through her website.Knowledge broker.
Slide 18: Okay. And so it’s interesting because, as scientists it might not come top of mind to collaborate with some of these individuals, but if you have someone like Becky here who clearly value science who clearly values the evidence and who was already interacting with thousands of clinicians on a regular basis. This is a way for our research to have much more true real life clinical impact.
Slide 19: Another example that I would like to bring to your attention is Dr. Tiffany Hogan here. So this is an example of a knowledge broker who is brokering her own science right so she is the scientist and in addition to other guests that she has on her podcast. She is disseminating to large amounts of people through this podcast.
Slide 20: An additional example is the Speech Science Podcast. So in this podcast, you have Matt Holt Michael McLeod and Michelle Wintering who are not necessarily scientists themselves, but they’re interacting with scientists and leaders in the field of communication sciences and disorders with the overall goal of disseminating knowledge of getting that scientific, beautiful knowledge that we love so much into the hands of clinicians of the people who really need it.
Slide 21: So what as a CRISP committee, we would like you to think about is, as a clinical practice researcher. Do you have the capacity and or the desire to do this yourself?We will be very frank about this. Some people have that capacity and desire and some people don’t. And that is ok. But if you don’t, there is this critical opportunity to increase the impact of your work by reaching out to some of these knowledge brokers.Again the examples that we talked about today included businesses, social media influencers, podcast hosts. So we want to think about who is already sharing that science.Right.Who is already connecting with large amounts of clinicians?Right.Let them communicate about your fabulous science. If you don’t want to do it yourself, or even if you want to do both. Right.So you can broker your own knowledge and you can reach out to some of these other people that might be more connected to the target audience. So a lot of these individuals,website owners, businesses, social media influencers, podcast host. They’re often looking for new and fresh content and so they are very, very happy to hear about your work that will help improve the lives of people with communication disorders and dysphagia. Right. Um, of course, we have the caveat there to choose wisely. We talked about pseudoscience. Very briefly, in the beginning, but of course you want to choose wisely but at the same time, it’s important to think about how it doesn’t necessarily have to be. It doesn’t have to be a scientist who gets the word out about your science. It could very well be one of these other roads that we talked about.
Slide 22: So I am thrilled for this next part of the module where we’re going to really dive down deeper by talking to two fabulous knowledge brokers Dr.Ianessa Humbert and Dr. Meredith Harold.And we’re going to talk about what does it really mean these are two knowledge brokers, they are doing this on a day to day basis. And we’re going to be able to chat with them about what it is that they do and how that looks.
Slide 23: So for a little bit of background Dr. Humbert is an accomplished scientist, professor and a highly sought after speaker.Her expertise is in swallowing and swallowing disorders, she receives over 100 speaking Invitations from around the world.And the most common feedback from attendees at her courses and speaking events is this is the first time, of course, has really forced me to think about what I’m doing.Dr. Hubbert’s teaching philosophy requires attendees to question everything they think they know the for the learning can begin.
Slide 24: So her work has been funded by the ASHFoundation and extends to non-traditional learning formats including her podcast, Down the Hatch. She has a YouTube channel and her STEP which is lovingly known as Swallowing Netflix, which I think is awesome.Dr Humbert has been on faculty at Johns Hopkins, University of Florida, University of Iowa.And the content from her courses is truly supported by scientific evidence from her lab and from the larger body of research literature and of course through plenty of thoughtful problem solving. So you can learn more about her and contact her and connect with her through her website, Ianessahumbert.com.
Slide 25: And we will also be chatting with Dr. Meredith Harold. So she is a former speech-language pathologist and university faculty member. And her full-time position right now is science communication and leadership in speech language pathology. She is best known for bridging the gap between clinical practice and science through The Informed SLP. She and her team at The Informed SLP locate and translate the field top clinical research in attempts to reduce the overwhelm of the massive amounts of research that’s coming out in our field on a monthly basis. She’s also known for digging deeply and working really tirelessly to ensure that clinicians in our field know the science and that scientists are relying heavily on our fields expert clinicians to push that research forward and maximize benefits to the clients we serve, and I hope that you’re seeing in both of these introductions, how much it really does fall right into those quotations that describe knowledge brokers. Dr. Harold acknowledges that her work would be impossible without the many years she spent as a school based SLP. And private practice owner, as well as her the time in her faculty positions and you can learn more about her at MeredithHarold.com.
Creating Impact Inside Academia and Outside Academia
Please note: The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Slide 1: In this segment of today’s talk, I will be discussing clinical impact in academia and outside of academia.
Slide 2: As we heard earlier in this presentation documenting your research impact is important for you, for several reasons.As such, Universities are becoming increasingly interested in understanding how faculty research is impactful, not just from an academic perspective.But also how their faculty research is making an impact beyond academia to try changes in areas such as in patient care, public healthand policy in the translation of effective clinical practice protocols by clinicians in the field.
Slide 3: And there are three main ways to measure research impact from an academic perspective and these include journal metrics, article metrics, and author metrics.And we’re going to be discussing these briefly today. In addition, I will present a few tools or resources that are available to you to enhance your impact.
Slide 4: So first let’s cover just a couple of very common journal impact metrics and these include impact factor and eigenfactor.In impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article and a journal has been cited in a particular year.
Slide 5: So for example, let’s take the2017 ASHA Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, who had a reported impact factor of 1.096 in 2017 so that means, on average, the articles published in 2015 and 2016 in that journal had been cited about 1.9 times in 2017. Eigenfactor metrics measure the number of times an article has been cited by the journal Citation Reports within the last five years.But this does not include self-citations and it does consider the journal in which the article was published.The metric is the ratio of the number of citations to the total number of articles, but please note. There are many journal metrics. These are just two common ones.
Slide 6: Next, let’s turn to author metrics. This is another venue for which impact is measured and commonly used author metrics are the ones that I’ve included here on this slide.The H-index quantifies a cumulative impact of an author scholarly output and performance.The H-index takes into consideration the number of citations of a researcher’s publications. So, for example, a researcher with an index of H has published H papers which have been cited, at least H times.Some advantages of the H index includes having just one number that describes the research quantity and impact. And it also offers a good way for researchers to be compared within a discipline.The H index score, however, can be skewed by self-citations and it may not be the most accurate metric for early researchers who are just getting started with their publication record.The G-index is just one of many variants of the H-index and it’s not used as often, but it is a metric that offers a way to describe the relative impact of a researcher citation, but giving more weight to highly cited articles and scores tend to be higher, the major effects.And finally, the Relative Citation Ratio or the(RCR). This was developed by the National Institutes of HealthOfficeof portfolio analysis and has been proposed as an alternative metric to the H-index. The RCR is calculated by dividing the number of citations of data paper received by the average number of citations. An article usually receives in that field which is then compared to the median RCR for all NIH funded papers.An advantage of the RCR is that it allows articles to be assessed within the context of their own field and also recognizes if there was a blockbuster article that was published in a less known journal. Again, there are many author metrics available, but these are just some common ones that are used.
Slide 7: Finally, let’s discuss article metrics and probably the most popular article metric is Altmetrics. So you may recognize the donut inside with a number inside.The number inside the donut represents the Altmetrics attention score and provides a co-lead and measure of how often an article has been mentioned or shared in various social media platforms.
Slide 8: The colors inside the donut represent the platform for which that share or mentioned occurred and the number inside the donut is the attention score.The higher score is the more attention that article received and that score is a weighted score because some social media outlets have a larger reach than others.But what is not represented by that number is whether or not that attention about the article was favorable or unfavorable. I encourage you to visit the Altmetrics website to learn more about this very popular article metric.
Slide 9: There are various tools and research tools and resources available to help researchers enhance their research impact and I just listed a few here.And I’m just going to briefly describe each of these. However, you might consider consulting with your university to see if they have any resources available.For example, at my university, the medical center library has numerous resources available to help researchers enhance their research impact and these were just a couple ofsuggestions that they provided. So first, register for an ORCiD.ORCiD is a nonprofit organization that supports thoseparticipating in research to get connected to their unique contributions in their field. So by getting a an ORCiD that’s unique to you, you will be able to tag or connect your work, such as your citations or your grants to you and that way you get credit for your research efforts.Another tool is to consider publishing and open access journals these journals tend to be more accessible to people and this articles published within them are sometimes cited more frequently.Sometimes open access journals may allow you to retain rights to your work, allowing you to further disseminate your research.My only caution is just to be careful of predatory journals and check with your institutions library to make sure you’re publishing and legitimate journals. At my university, they provide services to help you share your research data or articles, through the use of repositories.So with the increased interest in requirement for research, transparency, the use of such repositories may become increasingly vital.Just be sure to follow the policies of your IRB, your funding sponsors, and the journal policies.If your university does not have such repositories available, then you can try to self-archive your publications preprints, conference abstracts, etc.And open source online archive sites. Again, just be careful you understand the policies of the journal when it comes to posting pre or post prints.And finally, another tool is to consider creating a unique profile with organizations who monitor impact, such as Publons.And this organization aims to track your publications your citation metrics your peer reviews and your journal editing work in one easy in single profile.In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I was performing an article review for a journal and I went to upload my review on the journal website.And one of the questions I had to answer was, do you want to get credit for your review with Publons? And so I think it’s becoming increasingly recognized the importance of documenting your research impact.
Slide 10: So another way to promote your research impact outside of academia and to reach a broader audience is through non-traditional venues such as social media and blogs. As we heard earlier from Meredith, and we’re going to learn more about that later on in this presentation.But these are been used where as speech language pathologist and audiologist. We could have a broader impact on patient care the public and to help translate our research findings into clinical practice. So, similar to the traditional metrics we discussed previously, there are also metrics for social media and blog outlets that will give you that an idea of the number of likes, comments, shares and the number of reads and those sorts of data.In addition, there are third party analytic services that are available to help you monitor data from social media and blog outlets. Some are free and and some charge a fee for that service.
Slide 11: So I know we’ve only mentioned a handful of research impact metrics in the few minutes that I’ve had with you today. And I believe just briefly touched on a couple of ways to increase your research impact.And we’re going to discuss that more later on in the talk today. But the real question is, is does it work? What is the evidence say? And, in short, using these tools and strategies to enhance your research impact.
Slide 12: It really does work.
Slide 13: So what does the evidence show? So there is a growing body of literature that has shown significant and positive moderate to strong correlations between the number of social media mentions and the number of citations and this is true for both traditional social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter.But also academics social media outlets such as ResearchGate and Mendeley and the benefit of using these outlets is that researchers can really engage in their audience in unique waysIn addition, tenure and promotion committees are viewing these impact metrics as part of their review process. And again, we’re going to learn more about this later on in today’s talk to. Thank you.
Panel Discussion
Please note: The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Clinical Impact: Panel Discussion (Sarah Wallace, Trina Spencer) transcripts
Slide 1: Sarah: Hello, I’m Sarah Wallace, Trina and I will be facilitating our panel discussion about clinical impact.We have gathered a few clinical researchers together who we think will have helpful advice for others who are interested in increasing the clinical impact of their research. We’re going to start now by introducing our panel.
Slide 2: Sarah: Our first guest here is Dr. Megan Roberts. She is an associate professor in the Department of communication sciences and disorders at Northwestern University.
Slide 3: Sarah: Dr. Roberts is the principal investigator of the Early Intervention Research Group and has a strong social media presence to disseminate clinically relevant research in the area of early intervention and language development.
Slide 4: Sarah: Next is Dr. Ryan McCreery. He is the director of research at Boys Town National Research Hospital.Dr McCreary is the director of the auditory perception and cognition lab. They conduct research on how amplificationlanguage and cognition support speech perception and disseminate to clinical audiences through Twitter and Facebook.
Slide 5: Sarah:Next up is Dr. Kelly Farquharson. She’s an associate professor in the School of communication sciences and disorders at Florida State University.
Slide 6: Sarah:Kelly is the director of the children’s literacy and sound speech lab, also known as the Class Lab. She disseminates her work and other clinically relevant research via Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Slide 7: Sarah:John is a doctoral student at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He conducts research at the Centre for Research Excellence in Aphasia Recovery and Rehabilitation.
Slide 8: Sarah:We are especially excited for John to be on our panel because he disseminates clinical research using some pretty innovative methods for example John creates video abstracts about his studies that he posts on YouTube.Then they are shared widely across social media. I’m sure this is going to come up later in our discussion.
Slide 9: SarahAnd finally, Dr. Holly Storkel is a guest on our panel. She is a professor of speech language hearing sciences and disorders at the University of Kansas.Dr. Storkel also fulfills the roles of the Associate Dean for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Vice Provost for assessment and program development.
Slide 10: SarahHollyruns the Word and Sound Learning Lab, which disseminates her clinical research through Facebook and Instagram for parents and teachers. Her work can also be found on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Kudos. So now that we’ve introduced our panel we will jump into our discussion.
Trina: All right, I just want to welcome everybody. ummSarah, can you put it into gallery mode and stop sharing, then we can see everybody’s face. There we go. Excellent.All right, I just want to say hello and welcome our panelists. Thank you so much for joining us today. We’ve been looking forward to this discussion.As a reminder, our purpose for this panel is to help researchers create or increase their clinical impact from various methods of engagement and to document their impact for tenure and promotion purposes. Right. Our format is somewhat informal however Sarah and I have prepared some questions that are specific to each panel member and then some that are general for everybody to answer. Just so you know it is ok and anytime anyone can chime in. All right let’s just have a good, fun discussion. All right, Sarah, you got the first question.
Sarah: Absolutely. So we’re going to start with you, Megan you recently developed some guidelines for autism screening that have helped to bridge research and clinical practice. Can you tell us more about that? And specifically, what type of impact that has had on practice?
Megan:Yes, soI think one of the most impactful things that I’ve done is not necessarily what I’ve done in my federally funded research. It’s what I’ve done in collaboration with what I call clinicians in the wild, who are on the ground andyou know, part of regular, you know, everyday, everyday practice. And so what we did what we did was we have an Illinois, we have. It’s called medical diagnostics and that is how children get access towhat I called the golden Charlie. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to get the way they get access those specialized services. This is really precious and like, that’s it will give you one weightless.Long story short, we were trying to think of ways to use existing measures and new ways to say, okay, rather than one cut off are multiple thresholds, we could be using. So that may be primary care doctors couldcould do so to do an assessment and really really confident and then kids in the kind of middle gray zone, then you reserve a specialist and soI I’m kind of this.And how this has been impactful I most impact those because I partnered with clinicians, so that the science wasn’t slow down like it wasn’t that I discovered, like, Oh, this isn’t going to work. When you’re in it together, we wereDesigning the data collection tools that were embedded into clinical practice. Right. And so it wasn’t that I didn’t have to go back and do a chart review. I hadn’t we had at the very beginning of developing this program. We can evolve the clinicians so that we’ve designed a system that really work with everyday clinical practice. And then we got data analysis.And we just easy to do to extract. And then we were able to make these interesting conclusions that hopefully now are going to arm.
Trina: Or the clinicians, or the clinicians that were involved in this process still using the tool?
Megan: They’re using the tool. Yeah, and thenSo we had, we decided to video certain thing and ask certain questions to basically say, What is the best algorithm or combination of questions right? and sowe had generated the list together the measures we wanted to use. And then we partnered with a biostatistician to help with the fancy stuff and to be able to answer the question.
Trina: Do you think that because you’re engaged those clinicians from the beginning, they’re like, facilitating the spread or the dissemination past like your little project?
Megan: What COVID happens so. So I don’t know right now diagnostics are on hold. I will say, though, that, you know, we added another great example of of some some work since I worked on at Vanderbilt.They’ve done a tele version of this that we collected research data.Along with so that we were able to help some families around the waitlist and so we’re currently analyzing that data, which I hope will have an impact because we literally were doing autism diagnostics via zoom and parents was shackling really you know rating it has very high satisfaction. And so oftentimes we want to try these things and COVID andIt’s really taught us right rapid response and we adjust, but we will adjust and take data to see if these new methods are working. So that’s something that we just finished.That we’re hopefully going to publish up as I’ve kind of proof of concept, usability, just like did parents. You know, what did they think about us never seeing or child in person and saying their child’s autism like. That’s kind of freaky. And yeah, it went okay
Trina: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s interesting. Very cool. Well, thank you, Megan, I don’t know. Doesanybody else have another thought or question or comment for Megan?
John: What was the process of CO designing it? Was that like you came up with something and took it to them? or did they literallyyou know, give you the ideas? And I’m just wondering what that looked like the process.
Megan: So actually the question. The research question we had was not present at the beginning of the when we formed this program. What we when we formed the program. He said, now that we’re going to collect. We’re going to design or data collection instruments so that we can use this toto answer questions later on and then through the clinical work than the question emerge and we had access to data. So there’s lots of other questions. But what I would love of the world. And I think we could was that if we could take you know, people clinicians who really want to be part of research and really partner with them in a way that it’s it’s so it’s embedded for them. And it’s part of their process, I think it would be really impactful in terms of just moving science, a lot, a lot further.
Trina: Yeah, I agree with you there. I think that’s what it was a really good question. I teach a class on, you know, similar to this. And we talked a lot about the participatory community participatory based research and the whole reason that it comes about is so that we can ask the right questions and then make sure that you know you know, the research is at least relevant to them. And then so that they can maintain and sustain it and practice. So that’s really good.I’m actually going to give my next question to Kelly and if that’s okay with you, Sarah, or do you want to ask this question to Kelly, because I think it’s a good follow up to Megan’s question.
Sarah: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So you’re going to skip down to Kelly’s question and we’ll go back to Ryan.
Trina: Yeah,
Sarah: Sure thing.
Trina: You just want to swap me? And if they Kelly, because I think Kelly has something to say about this idea she wanted the shifts that you mentioned is evolving more SLPs in your research and we were kind of wondering, are you talking about them as research participants or partners or, you know, actually, researchers. So can you tell us more about what you think and what the impact in clinical practice do you think that will have? Kind of piggybacking on Megan’s answer.
Kelly: Yeah. Absolutely. And I think the work Megan’s been doing is just so fascinating and I’ve appreciated her energy on social media to share because it’s helped me learn a lot about the work she’s doing too. So far, my efforts have been in partnering with SLPs but you know having them participate in the studies and some of the studies that I’ve been doing. So I have had collaborative partnerships with clinicians and I absolutely plan to continue to do that.Right now, a lot of the work that we’ve been doing has been recruiting SLPs to participate in studies. Some of them have been survey based. Some of them are, you know, kind of most take place online again as Megan said due to COVID. But yeah, we we’ve mostly been focusing on SLPs as the research participants. But part of the reason for that, and I do still view that as a partnership, even though it’s kind of indirect. Part of the reason for that is a lot of my initial research and energy was really focusing on, you know, my, my area of interest and expertise with children with speech sound disorders and or dyslexia.And I’m a school based SLP by practice. And so that’s my clinical experience. And so I think a lot about you know what happens in schools and how those how speech sound production is related to literacy and literacy acquisition. So the research I was doing kind of started in this area of cognitive processing and working memory and you know, I found that at the end of the day as interesting as I found the work and I found the results. I kind of sort of thinking and was getting feedback from clinicians kind of saying like, so what, like, what should we do right?So not so what in form of it’s not interesting. But so, like, okay, great. If that’s the problem like, How do I fix it, right? What’s the treatment for it? How do I assess that? Is that my role? Is that somebody else’s role? And that really kind of started this process of thinking about studying the settings in which SLPs are making clinical decisions. And that’s really been my focus for the past few projects that I’ve done. Because we have to understand the system that they’re working and I think that’s, you know, a lot of Megan’s point to. It’s just kind of understanding the structure, you know, you’re not able to see kids in person. What do you, what do you do, you have to do something, you know, kind of understanding that system. And so that’s been really an area focus recently is just kind of really descriptively even getting a sense of what’s possible in a school based setting and that has been the setting. I’m focused on, but I’m interested in other settings to but that has been the setting I focused on just based on my own clinical experience.
Margaret Rogers: Really trying to understand how can we possibly offer research that’s helpful to SLPs if it doesn’t fit in there. It’s not ecologically valid, it doesn’t fit in there setting. And so we can’t ask them the partner because they’re, it’s not in alignment with what they’re required to do? So that’s really been like the main area that I’ve been focusing on is that setting based. You know those constraints.
Trina: Yeah, it sounds like you’re really dipping your toes into like implementation research out of context, right, in which your interventions may be implemented, you need to understand the context really well.
Kelly: Yeah,
Trina: and possibly create some like implementation support strategies to ensure that the interventions can be sustained.That’s really cool.
Kelly: Yeah, I think it’s really necessary in the schools. We just had thanks to Sarah’s invitation of special issue and topics and language disorders that was all about applying evidence based practices, specifically in the schools and I really has been like thinking about that setting is a really unique and crucial setting for children receiving services, a lot of children only receive services that way.And there’s so many constraints and pressures on SLPs time and resources that it makes it really hard to do evidence based practices when you’re not seeing kids, one on one. But that’s how the research was conducted or you’re seeing kids in a classroom and the intervention, you want to use has never been tested in that setting, you know. So I think it’s a really important way to move towards implementing more interventions.
Trina: Yeah, very good. Excellent.
Sarah: Now, so we’re going to shift gears now a little bit just in terms of a different area of our field. But I actually think our question for Ryan is a really nice kind of build on what we’ve talked about so far. So Ryan you’ve developed in audibility based hearing aid Canada see criterion that’s used in clinics across North America.And in our discussions we assume that this is something that you guys developed within your research lab and we wanted to know more about how did you help clinics learn about it and then facilitate their use of this criterion.
Ryan: Yeah, so this criterion sort of came out of some experimental research that we did.Where we noticed that audiologists in general. We’re having a hard time deciding about whether to fit hearing aids on kids who had mild hearing loss. And so it’s kind of interesting. You see these kids with hearing loss, and you would kind of look at the kids in the mild group and you would look at some of the things that you think would predict their hearing aid useAnd a lot of these kids weren’t even being offered amplification. And so rather than, you know, just saying.You know, wow audiologists are really doing a bad job of trying to figure out when to recommend amplification. We started to dig into some of the complexities that are related to how we assess hearing and how we can take some outcome measures that we’ve established already in the clinic and sort of build on those for hearing aid candidates. SoUm, so we essentially sought input from audiologist and said look, we’re trying to develop a tool here that will help youSo just essentially trying to gather input from the clinicians. And one of the pieces of feedback that we got is, you know, when we talk to families about mild hearing loss, we use the word mild and immediately.They assume that that means it’s sort of inconsequential. And so we started to think about different ways to communicate with families about audibility and about hearing loss.That really reflect the challenges that children with hearing loss encounter and soIt was really a partnership where we took some of the ideas that we had before we wrote a paper about it or decided to do a study, we just said, What would you think about, you know, using this work? What are the problems that you see with changing the way we, you know, do this? And then we even talked to parents, we had focus groups with parents to say of kids who had been diagnosed with hearing loss. And they would say you know the audiogram doesn’t mean anything to me like and these terms mild, moderate and severe. That those are words that just don’t really reflect what I see in my child, my child has severe hearing loss, but they’re doing really well.Or my child has mild hearing loss or they’re struggling and so you were seeing some of these things that were just disconnects. And then we would go back as a group and talk about, well, what can we do about this? Like if it means getting rid of the audiogram we willing to do that or you know I mean really having discussions about turning things upside down.And not holding on to like well these are the foundations of what we do. But, but how do weCould because we really want to help the kids with with hearing loss and give them the intervention that they need.And the clinicians want that too, but they don’t want to be wrong. Right. They don’t want to recommend a hearing aid and then find out later a child didn’t need it or something like that. So it’s, it is really that partnership that Megan talked about where you’re trying to establish that and also related to what Kelly was saying about using sort of I have clinical knowledge from being an audiologist. But I haven’t practiced forever. So really getting input from people who actually see patients right now.
Sarah: Yeah, I liked what you talked about, because it was to me it seems like you’re not even just working with the clinicians to try to make sure it’s something practical and useful to them, but you’re also taking it a step further and looking at who their stakeholders are. When thinking about the parents and then by proxy. I guess the children as well. And so it’s almost like this double layer of looking at who that the different stakeholders are and what are some of the different barriers to practice. So I think that aspect of implementation and certainly complex, but it’s really interesting how you guys were able to dig into those multiple layers.
Megan: Can I ask a question?
Sarah: Yeah
Megan: At the beginning, like the very beginning, you were like, oh, we noticed that they were having a hard time fitting to hearing like when the hearing aids for the kids with mild hearing loss. Did you notice that or did they notice it? Like was it them I’m saying, like how we really don’t know or you being like, whoa.I’m just wondering where or was both, like, I’m wondering. Ryan: Yeah, I think it was one of those situations where I think all of us have experienced in our research where we have clinical experiences or interactions with clinicians and sort of give us an intuition about what something will be and then it’s sort of confirmed by the data. Um, it was moreI guess inconsistent than I would have expected because I think as practitioners, we tend to think about, well everybody kind of practices the same way that I do like we don’t seeas an individual practitioner, you don’t see the variability in some of these areas. And so you just think, Well, this isn’t that big of a problem because, you know, this is what I do. But when you look at it sort of from a higher level and you see across clinicians, what’s happening. You see that that we call an equity boys is playing out as like people aren’t sure what to do. It’s not that they don’t want to helpor that they have something against kids with mild degrees of hearing loss. It’s just that there, they get stuck.And so it was really helpful for us. And that’s helpful for the clinicians and the parents to see that too.Because when they see the data, they’re like, oh, this is why when I talked to another family who has a kid who’s audiogram looks just like my kids audiogram, they got a hearing aid and we didn’t because we just don’t aren’t sure what to do.
Megan: It’s helpful. I wasn’t sure what the in terms of the uptake rate. So if it was they had self identified as an area I wasn’t sure if that has influenced than their receptiveness to implement your, your new algorithm.
Ryan: Yeah, I think so. I thinkI think the fact that they identified the problem and that it was it’s been sort of a long standing issue that helped us a ton. Because we’re not trying to force anything on them. They sort of said we do this.
Megan: Yeah, cool. Thanks
Trina: So one of the thing that strikes me about all three of the comments or answers you you researchers have made is that you’re talking about research that is maybe less traditionalRight, a research methodology, including community based participatory research or design based implementation research.And those are, you know, methodology is that we don’t often read about in our journals and we want advocacy study with all these controls for internal validity. But then as soon as you do that, you have less relevance for the you know the implementation that you’re thinking about. So, I mean, that’s kind of what strikes me as interesting about this and that good clinical research requires maybe more mixed methods or, you know, maybe thinking outside the box a little bit about how we were trained as researchers. Anybody have any other thoughts about that.
Holly: Yeah, I’ve been on that and say for sure, we, we need to really expand the methods that we’re using, and really be doing a lot more work that is in the wild to use Megan’s phrase and being able to publish that. And so I think that’s alsoI’m speaking as an Editor in Chief of Language Speech and Hearing Services in the Schools. We need our, our journals to come up to speed with that kind of thing.So sometimes you see papers come through and people immediately say, Well, you know, it’s not a, you know, phase three randomized clinical trial and therefore we can publish it. You know, but we get a lot of value out of case studies and things like that that are done in the wild and can start to point to some of those issues that would need to be addressed for a larger study.So I think we definitely need to be thinking in that direction and not now kind of move away from our gold standard of a clinical trial.And think about also doing some of these other things that are in the real world, so that we can see how some of these systems and other pressures sort of play out.
John: I was gonna say, I can see as a you know a junior researcher such just the disconnect between what clinicians want they want the bottom line, they want the practical messy. How do we do this, but researchers at least traditionally that the things you get grant for a very tightly controlled studies, as you said,publishing the paper, and that’s it. You know, there’s no reward in a system for researchers doing these kind of things. So, at least in Australia. And I think the UK. I’m not sure that the US but they finally starting to include you know research impact and these kind of things as important factors, rather than just what quantity of papers have you pushed out in the last five years. So maybe that’ll make a difference in the long term.
Holly: What I also raises a good point to that this kind of messy research kind of does guard against a quick turnaround time so it’s kind of the whole entire system that promotion and tenure and those types of things, as well as what we value as a field. And what we want to see in our journals, what we want to see get funded.I think we need to go advocacy effort around that to say we need this to it. Not to say that we need to throw out you know gold standard and clinical trials, but we need to have this line going as well so that we can actually be thinking about how we implement those best practices.
John: And I’ll be interested in who you know the dissemination that I can join, it’s actually getting paid. And who’s doing that because they believe it’s important you know, I know you can include that in a grant nowadays, but I think often from what I hear people are just doing it because they want they want their work to make an impact.
Trina: Yeah, absolutely.
Megan: Well, I know funding agencies are now requiring it so like I just submitted a grant to IES and they want a very extensive access to education sciences.And Trina, you probably know this well like they want to bury. I mean it is getting more and more pages they want to they want you to know. They want to know what you’re going to do with this data and data I attended and he NIH’s tighter, which is the trends, but it’s training on implementation and dissemination. I was the only non physician, I swear. Because maybe there was somebody a nurse.
Trina: I have the exact same experience.
Yeah, there was definitely it was definitely not know that honest. I was the only SLP, but that was exclusively on how to write a grant to fund disseminated implementation and dissemination work. We, we haven’t funded a lot, you know, our, our institute in terms of NIDCD at NIH funded a ton of it. But I do think, I think we are trending. I do think there is going to be a way to get paid. I think I think we are to, you know, I think our field is a little bit slower, a little being very kind. In terms of this, but I think the more people the more reviewers that are viewing the papers. Right. Soto Holly’s point. It’s like, it’s everywhere in the system where we’re based in writing you publish the paper with other viewers you know you know if you’re lucky enough to get an editor like Holly. Maybe she will shepherd it because she knows that it’s hard and she’ll give it to the reviewer experience with this. But if you get a reviewer you know, that doesn’t understand this type of methodology, it’s just, it’s another barrier that we’re you’re experiencing, but I do, I do. I am hopeful that we are going to get there on her way up, but we will
Trina: Yeah, so I have experienced all of those barriers that you guys have mentioned and but I’m very persistent right I really care about this implementation. I really care about clinical impact.Otherwise I would never become a researcher, if I couldn’t have made a clinical impact which, you know, I can see some head nods, like we were clinicians once.We that’s our audience, we need to make sure they have the right tools. But well, one of the things I find myself doing is advocating for implementation and in the wild research like Megan says in my cover letter and in my response to reviewers I advocate.We must have this work; we must have this work.Right. So this isn’t a fair criticism because this is work that’s actually done in the real studying with real implementers so I find myself doing that all the time. Justifying my work so
Holly: What one other point on this, too, is I think another place, we should really be thinking about this is training students that we should be training our students, not just in advocacy research, but making sure that our doctoral students are getting training in Implementation Science and community based participatory research and that way we build our ability to do this because it is a different kind of methodology because of all of the the messiness that goes into it and so you know as as Megan and Trina we’re both saying or field is a little behind in this way that wewe haven’t been doing a lot of it. We don’t have a lot of people who aren’t necessarily trained in it and have a lot of expertise. And so that’s another place where we really need to build our expertise in this area. And then that helps with other things too with reviewers and so on. Because now, people say, Oh, of course. It’s a mixed methods study I know exactly what to do with these data and how to look at this
Trina: So I’m going to transition us to another to another question. Question for John. But before that, I do want to say the result of all these barriers that you guys have just mentioned, is that there isn’t that much research coming out of our ASHA journals that are clinically are directed at clinical impact. And if you haven’t readMegan is an author of a really great paper that came out AJSLP, I believe. And the statistic is that only about 25% of thearticles published in ASHA journals have a clinic. You don’t have a clinical focus right.
Megan: I don’t know. Fun fact about that willing to bear that paper was rejected.Three times I had to petition. I had to petition, like I was. And that was just about because you want to know what?Nobody wanted to hear it.Because it’s ugly data, but I didn’t make it up like that’s the hard part, right, is that if people don’t either want to read it. Don’t want to read the we don’t have enough clinical practice or search like that is how they’re good, then they’re gonna. What do you think they’re going to do with a DNI paper that comes in a way like it’s just it’s non traditional I know how to evaluate this mold this, you know, and I totally agree with Holly’s point, that would be great to think as a group, about what this I will be she is right. I believe it is the students are future students that are going to change this. And so how can we together as a group, say likeIs there, you know, are other group of people across content areas right because it’s about the methods.In CSD that want to learn X, Y, or Z and we all would ever meet quarterly to either get to brainstorm something or but yes to unite because I do, I believe Holly’s right. I think the students are the future.
Trina: Just on that topic. Sorry I beat you, Kelly, but I actually created a course, a doctoral level course called InterventionDesign and Implementation Research for that exact purpose. It’s all the, you know, innovative designs community based participatory research mixed methods smartdesign based implementation research for that exact reason. And it’s also inner professional, so I get students from all different departments. So if anybody wants to have like chat or commiserate with me or not. I would love it, love, love, love it. Okay. Kelly.
Kelly: Can I take that class. That sounds so
Trina: You’re not that far away.
Kelly: Yeah, right. I was actually only just gonna comment just to add to what Megan was saying about how difficult it can be sometimes to get some of these studies published and a data set that I’ve published on a lot comes from work with my postdoc mentor, Laura Justice at Ohio State and it school based data from an entire academic school year, looking at what happens in language therapy all recorded by the SLP’s. I mean, incredible cohort of SLPs that gave us such robust data.And it was very hard to get some of the initial findings published and it was not data we made up. It was robust longitudinal data.It was very hard to get it published because like you said, it’s not it’s ugly data, you know, it’s not necessary, and it’s not anything against the the clinicians whatsoever. It’s fully against the system, you know, showing what barriers are in the way of good language therapy sometimes it’s hard to get that word out. And so I think the other pieces. You know, I don’t know who exactly will be watching this panel. But if it is cliniciansI’d love for them to know how hard we have to try sometimes to get clinically relevant stuff published, you know, to begin with, it’s a real hurdle on our end too.
Trina: But tell me, is it worth it.
Kelly: Well, ultimately. Yeah, absolutely.
Trina: Okay. I don’t know Megan doesn’t look like she’s convinced that it’s worth it.
Megan: I don’t know. I do people read research articles or do today just to social media or are they looking for what I’d be better off talking about but but I do believe that peer review process is insanely important every paper. I’ve ever written. Even the ones that have been rejected 25 times, are better for that peer review process. So, I do believe in that process. I really do.
Kelly: Yeah, I need to
Trina: Go ahead
Kelly: And I’ll shut up. I promise. Is that the only thing I’ll say, Oh, I’m sorry Holly. The only thing I’ll say is that I do think that if we if we don’t make it important, if we don’t think it’s worth it, thenwe lose, right.And then clinical information is not going to be published. And so, you know, we have to be the change makers right now until our students are able to do so, we have to be the one saying this matters. This has to get out there and I think that’s why
Trina: Excellent
Holly: So kind of two points about that if I can remember, both of them.What one is that I think the other key problem we have that Kelly was pointing out, too, is that we’re we’re trained to want some very strong straightforward conclusion at the end of a research article and when you have messy data, you end up with kind of strengths and weaknesses are barriers and facilitators and it’s not like boom. Here’s the thing.And so I think that’s another thing that again we need to think about as as we’re training people. I think this even goes into training clinicians too, right?You know, clinicians can have the. Here’s problem. A. And here’s the treatment that you give it. It’s more like, well, there’s this and there’s that you’ve got away at separately and you know, and then you put it all together and you come out with the answer. And so I think we all need to get kind of comfortable in that that messiness and the lack of straightforwardness in our field and really kind of embrace that.And then the second point was more on, you know, is it worth it. Yes, because our research has basically no impact unless we do the implementation science work. It’s the implementation piece that actually gets that best practices out in the field gets it in the hands of clinicians and actually changed the changes people’s lives.So it really is that the reason it really is the reason we’re doing it and we just need to make that pathway much much smoother.Because it’s hard, even if even if the peer review and the rest of it are smooth just doing the work is still hard because it’s so collaborative and collaborative work is just really challenging in that way.
Trina: Excellent. Those are great points. So, and a good segue for John’s question, which is about his video abstracts. Right. So maybe you mentioned that you know the clinicians are probably not reading our journal articles or at least not as much as we would like them to. But maybe it’s because only 25% of them are relevant to them, but let’s think about the other ways to make our research relevant or disseminate in ways that are you know, more acceptable to our audiences. SoJohn. Tell us about your video abstracts and I’m really curious about like what kind of software or platforms you use and like how much time it takes to produce a two minute video edited, you know, film it, edited it, post it.
John: Yep, the answer may not please youjust how long it takes. He does telematics, um, and so the question of whether I can continue to do that. Or it’s a privilege of being a PhD students. On the line for one day and we’ll get started. I did lightning presentation to the conference and it was you know I had, I think, three minutes to present this research and it was fairly you know, unlike some of the stuff that’s been discussed. So I thought it was a very academic question was, was what is the term multimodal. How was that used in the field of aphasia that kind of a background questions my research so because it’s important to me. But as far as clinicians that I just thought this is not anything I can pick up and use. But having done that, three minute lightning round it really may me, you know, kind of visualize things on the slides and be very efficient very quick. I then went back and presented that to my department where I work, clinically and thinking that, though. Just come shrug it off, but actually they were even though they didn’t say we can’t directly use that it was they found it useful and interesting. So that kind of got me thinking, you know, maybe we shouldn’t assume that all this is just for research. This is just academic that maybe we canpublish this stuff as a video abstract, which I kind of knew were out there that have produced one so I kind of repurposed that line and presentation to a video abstracts and had that published. So then the next systematic review. I did as part of my PhD was just looking a intensity and aphasia, and then how intense and the dose that patients need. And again, I’ve got like my systematic reviews are kind of came up that we need more research and there wasn’t strong conclusions andSo, you, you know, you might think that’s a no result. But actually that’s important for clinicians to know. So I again put that into a video abstract.And I thinkYou know, that is messy. That is that is data that’s not ready to go. But it’s okay to say, well, we don’t know yet. And this is the degree of certainty and I think clinicians can use that because they can say to patients actually you’re wanting to do six days a week. There’s no clear need for that yet. You know, we don’t know that your missing out. We don’t know that you should do it or not.But then along that process. I thought, how ironic that you know we’re doing research about aphasia, and it’s in like even the clinicians can’t necessarily read our articles.So I did an aphasia friendly video abstract as well and kind of have to talk, the general into publishing that alongside and I think that really took off.Soyou get a lot of questions on Twitter from not just speech pathologist that all sorts of researchers, saying, how do you do these things?So we are the center of research excellence excellence for aphasia.We’re developing a package on hold to do video abstracts and it was done PowerPoints, believe it or not, with some voiceovers and little bit of editing Camtasia, but we’ll have a full tool on how to do what how to make aphasia friendly for those working in that field.But yeah, it’s, it’s probably 10 to 20 hours. I haven’t measured it but a colleague of mine has said Harvey and he said was about 20 hours for two, three minute video so not pretty, but I think you could, you know, we were pretty fussy and we made it really a high standard and visually appealing and probably went a bit overboard. Whereas I think you could just tell them message really simply without animation and get away with less and it would still have the same impact.
Trina: That’s awesome. So this question that we had for you. Lots of people asked you, because they want to know how to do it, too. They think that’s a cool way to disseminate.
John:Yes massive interest.
Trina:I certainly interest. I certainly think as our clinicians are, you know, they’re young and as we age, they’re going to be younger and younger. Right. They like their information really short visual, videos, right? So I too have been watching these video abstracts and that you know that evolution of it. And I think it’s a great way to kind of penetrate that audience that stakeholder
John: And it’s not that there’s a paper that looked into media abstract and found that you don’t necessarily get more breeds of your article because people but you get a broader audience. So I’ve got people in the contract work with aphasia, looking at it and people we are in speech pathology looking at, because you know they can give two minutes, three minutes.Any longer than that, they’re probably going to skip through it and maybe not watch it. But yeah, so it’s interesting the breadth of people who are looking at this research, which I thought was not that relevant.
Megan:Has ASHA journals. Have they ever so I publishing one journal ones, and they made me do. And I was like, this is terrible. I didn’t know what I was doing. And it was just me awkwardly talking on camera, and it did not take me my 20 hours, it took me like three minutes. The amount of time it took you. But it was required.So is that something like I think for dissemination and for a physicians. Right. It was a medical journal. So I’m wonderingI hey I spent 20 hours responding and dumb reviewer comments, I’d be happy to spend that 20 hours making a video abstract if we could change that process. I mean. Yeah.Great with you as always great reviewers. Now, but so ASHA journals, do you know, has that ever been talked about?
Holly: So,
Ryan: Go ahead, Holly.
Holly: No, you go ahead.
Ryan: So I had an experience with a special issue that we did for JSLHR, a couple years ago were on statistics which has to be like one of the most boring and inaccessible topics that you can imagine likeYou know the other than the supplement on watching paint dry. I think it was probably the least exciting one they’ve ever done.But they did some really cool marketing and videos ahead of them to sort of promote it and I was impressed with the number of people who commented that they wouldn’t have really done that, if they hadn’t seen sort of the short marketing interview that ASHA did with us as part of that. And I was going into it, I was like I was really skeptical because I was like, No, first of all, no one’s gonna care about the special as you want statistics. And second of all, no one’s going to care about the video that accompanies this like it’s sort of piling on but it actually I think drew people in in the way that John is describing for his own work. So I don’t think it’s required, but I do think there’s a mechanism by which they can sort of couple these things together both Holly and I are Editors in Chief for ASHA journals this year, so we can probably take that feedback back to her.But what were you gonna say Holly?
Holly: Yeah, basically, that same thing that that that ASHA journalist has the context blog which typically they focus more on special, special forums special issues. And there’s like a little write up. That’s a blog right up. But then there’s often interviews with the guest editor, as Ryan was describing, you know, trying to kind of highlight what’s in the forum, why it’s important;a kind of where the personal story of how the person got dragged into the editor for this forum and whatever.But I think, I think that has helped bring attention to articles that are in forums and typically forums are written, maybe not the statistics one but on the hot topics are things that my kind of pull it an audience. And so I think there has been some success in that regard ofdrawing attention to certain kinds of publications, but it hasn’t been as widespread. The, the one thing that ASHA journals do have is the plain language summary that authors have to choose to do through grow kudos, but if you do that, then it’s side by side with the more technical summary.And you’d still have to view, you know, looking for the article and the article page to find that or the author would need to be putting it out on social media so that people would find it.But that’s kind of what whatASHA has done so far in terms of trying to give a more public and friendly introduction to different kinds of articles. But, but I do think the video can be can be a good choice as well.
John: So my papers so metal multimodal terminology that was AJSLP. That video was it was linked in the main page, rather than embedded so people probably wouldn’t be seeing unless they were already planning to read the article. So I think that was a shame. But you know, I think the so many companies out there who are way ahead of the same kind of slick marketing and things are ready to go and offer, we should turn into marketers or compete with them but if we continue to publish abstracts and clinicians have to translate although of course they’re going to go for these easy options.
Sarah: So this is such a rich discussion but I need to move us on but we do have a question remains for Holly and it’s similarly related to kind of the nuts and bolts of some of the dissemination issues. So, and alsoHolly, justto prepare you,it’s kind of a multi layered question.So in any event, we took a peek at your CV, I noticed that you manage and are regularly post to several Facebook groups to Twitter, Instagram, anyone who knows you knows that you have a strong social media presence.And I think most people who are going to watch this panel are and ask some questions about the amount of dissemination you engage in and how you manage all of this? I know it was something Trina and I talked about so just a few questions and don’t feel that you have to answer them in this particular order.But just in general, how do you keep up with so many different social media platforms? And then about how much time do you spend doing some of this social media dissemination and how are you justifying the amount of time you spend?And are you documenting it in some particular way? And do you advise this type of engagement and for junior researchers or non tenure folks?So I told you I warned you it would be 6000 questions so how bout it Holly? We’re curious to hear from you.
Holly: Well, luckily, I have my iPad here. So I took notes on all that because I was worried about multipart questions.So the first thing is I cheat. So for my lab social media accounts. I actually don’tdon’t run them.The lab runs it. And so I did like a little course on how to be his social media guru was like some free one hour thing and you know, basically got some some tips of, kind of, how do you automate it. So this was a course that was intended for people who are going to have a side hustle as like a social media person. And so the idea was, you’d have like a bajillion clients or a lot of money.And you’d be running their social media accounts for them. And so kind of what what they have recommended was to kind of you know, make it really easy. So for my lab, I’ve set up a structure for it so that people who work in the lab can do to the posts, so we we have identified one. One you need to figure out, like, who is this aimed at?So the lab social media accounts is is aimed at teachers and parents. It’s not aimed at SLPs.And you need to have a clear vision of, like, what are you trying to communicate to them. What is the point of this and so what I honed in on was more, you know, helping people understand what language is because the lay person really doesn’t know what language is and how it’s different from speech.Helping them understand some things about normal development and disorders and what speech language pathologistsdo. So, you know, trying to get information out there. So if people are concerned, they would knew they would know that they shouldbe concerned and wouldknow where to go for help. And then the other big part is just trying to help parents and teachers know how to support language growth in their child with different kinds of tips and things. So that was kind of the point. The reason why we wanted to have social media was really so that we could get subjects into our studies. And so we use. We do some advertising for our studies, when we’re recruiting and things like that.We’ve never really gotten much from that. So I don’t know that that was a good reason that the other reason we wanted to do it, too, was just to build relations in the community.We often do your research and schools and, you know, schools are busy. They have a lot of stuff going on. And so if you just cold call them and say, Hey, I got a research project you want to give me some kids? They’re kind of likeSo he sort of thought, you know, if we could build our presence and build that networking and have people know that we’re like the fun people who read books to kids and teach the new words and new words are a good deal. And some of that kind of stuff. It might help us, you know, build that relationship and be able to partner with school then it wouldn’t be so much a cold call and some of that’s probably been true.We’ve still, you know, built relationships with the schools that we’ve worked in as well that have helped you know maintain that. So the social media, maybe help some. So then how I said at the lab account we we have days so motivation Monday.Try it out Tuesday.Word Wednesday. Throwback Thursday books fast. Fact Friday. And so the first to the Monday and Tuesday or more, here is some activities you can do with your kid.Different, different versions of that. And then the word we we study we’re learning. And so we highlight various academic words that are good for kids to know and give some tips of like how you would teach that.We teach our words through book reading. So we always highlight books on Thursday that again, these are good books. Try out with your kids will be a fun read.And then the fastFact Friday was more some of that, what is language. What’s a communication disorder?What’s a speech language pathologist? Some of those kinds of things.So with that kind of structure. It’s really easy then for people to know what kind of thing to plug in each day so usually someone in the lab is responsible for doing the social media posts for, you know, some period of time, it might be a week. It might be a month, make the whole semester and then it’ll rotate to someone else.We have Hootsuite which is just a website that allows you to connect all your social media accounts and it allows you to schedule posts on different days so you can just sit down and here’s what the Monday post is and it could be for this Monday, or it could be from three weeks from now and again it just makes it really easy to put stuff in.And not have to, like, remember to do it, you know, Monday morning. Oh, we got to get the post up we just, you know, plug a bunch in and let them go.And then we also have Canva, which is just another website that you know makes it really easy to make images.And you can, you know, build up your brand in there. And so again, they give you a bunch of templates. So it’s just really easy to just pop up a template throw in whatever your little message is.Do your quick posts, stick it on Hootsuite and it’s plugged in and ready to go.So it doesn’t really take a ton of time actually all the research assistants would prefer to do the social media as opposed to like tedious data entry or anything else, or frustrating, you know, phone tag with people.And I think it’s actually good too. I mean, there’s only so much data entry, you can do to sometimes you need to do some data entry, then do a couple social media posts andI think it’s really good experience for the students as well.Even if their clinical master students, you know, it’s that quick. You know, I’m in a meeting with a parent and I need to illustrate a language concept or I need to give them some ideas of how they could support their child. These are the kinds of things that you can fall back on.So that’s, that’s how the the labs social media account kind of keeps up and has really regular posts.If you look at my social media accounts which are more geared towards each language pathologist and professionals. I don’t post on there, nearly as much. And I consider that just more kind of like a hobby. I don’t have any real skills. I don’t knit or you know quilts or anything like that. So this is like my one creative outlet, which is, you know, picking colored backgrounds on Canva.That’s not at all creative if you’re actually a creative person. But if you’re like a terrible creative person it’s like look what I made its kind of blue background was some red bubbles. Whoo. I’m a genius.So that’s, that’s kind of how my mind around so I don’t really spend that much time on it, it’s more of the lab pieces more in collective effort.More of a distributed efforts that it’s not, you know, pulling on any one person’s time too much and then I just kind of do what I can for my own social media accounts.What else did you ask me, oh document?. Um, so I do have on my CV some some information about my various accounts. How many followers are I have. I don’t know if anyone’s impressed by that or not, but it’s there, that’s one way that I documented.When I’ve done some other things like lead chats or something like that. Again I document that kind of thing. In the same way that I would document a presentation.I also have on my articles, a variety of kind of metrics. So if I have articles that have really high downloads. I know that I note that in my CV.If they have high old metrics which the all metric is on the article, and it’s about blog mentions and Twitter. Twitter tweets and that kind of stuff. So if, if it’s high, then I’ll document that.And I do think that there. That is a way to get information out to people that you know, not everyone’s reading the table of contents as it comes out for the different journals. So, you know, having a following and social media and posting little quick summary is about your article is something that draws attention to it and gets people to kind of go look at it and see if it’s something they want to read or not. SoI do think it’s a good way to kind of drive people to the work that you’re doing. And that’s, that’s kind of the value, butI think it is pretty hard to show some of the impact. And I’m not sure how much my colleagues really care about that. I think it probably varies a lot from department to department, whether they think these kinds of efforts have value or not.
Trina: So I actually want to follow up on that, right?Because one of the things we talked about before is sometimes, well, we don’t do enough clinical research but it could be that there aren’t enough reinforcers for clinical research right?And so clinical impacts seems to be one of those things that it’s kind of like making its way into consideration for tenure and promotion.I want to know as a follow up to Holly’s response if any of you have had experience documenting your clinical impact outside of journal articles and research. You know, like the traditional things and are they considered when you go up for promotion or tenure?
Kelly: Well as probably one of the few people on this panel who still has to go up for tenure, maybe besides John. I sure hope so I’ll just say that I hope it accounts because I do. I just been taking notes of the other things that Holly and documents on her CV. But in addition to those kinds of things. I’ve also included, you know, like I’ve been interviewed on a few podcasts. In fact, one with Holly and so I’m you know I’ve included those kinds of things. And in my, you know, CV with my department, we have an annual review process, whether or not your pre post tenure your clinical faculty, everybody gets the same review process and I do always talk about you know that I was invited to do this live presentation on Instagram, even if it’s a discussion with you know I do that frequently with a clinician who, you know, we want to have a back and forth about a particular topic. And so I put that on my CV. And have that has been kind of written up in the summary reports are my annual evaluations of, you know, that I have disseminated outside of the traditional expectations. You know that I have social media following and you know that I have done podcast and those kinds of things. And I think it’s helpful. It’s also, you know, like, like the work that we do on that we publish in articles its PR for the university that we, you know, there’s a researcher for Florida State on seniorsspeakpodcast.com so you knowthose are really important for the university too. So I do think it’s appreciated. I hope it’s appreciated more than I am currently envisioning but um yeah I think it is valued in my institution.
Holly: And I think sometimes you have to build that stories soso this is for another person. This was a while ago someone went up for tenure in another department and I was on the university Promotion and Tenure Committee, and it was it was written very clearly in the personal statement very clearly from the department perspective that they really value the blog that she was writing at that time.And I think even maybe some of the external evaluators even commented on it as well. So it was clear in that department that that had a big cache in what she was doing and who she was targeting and so on.But I don’t know that in other departments, you would see the same thing. So in some ways, being vocal about what you’re doing on social media and why you’re doing it is probably an important thing to do to sort oftest the waters and see if if people believe that and andand maybe build that kind of support.
Ryan: Yeah, I think from someone who’s at a place where tenure does not exist and that we just write grants forever. Um, the, I think we always have to try to balance the impact side of our work.To say, okay, like we have to do all the incentive based things that we do to write papers and write grants and those sorts of things. But if we if we’re not having a community impact then.I think you wouldn’t be part of the organization that I’m a part of because of that service to the community and service to people is a big piece of what our identity is as an organization. And so even if there’s not as much of an appreciation in the scientific community for for those types of activities, our organization really loves that stuff.And so that makes it really easy because there’s the institutional sort of culture around that.And and there’s social media accounts for the organization that have very similar goals and there’s people in organization who can help with that. And my hope is that you know, and I haven’t been successful in convincing anyone at those tenure granting institutions to change how they look at these things. But I think that’s so important because until that happens, it’s always going to be sort of like icing on the cake. It can’t really be because I’m not going to tell anybody in a in a junior position to go out you know, conquer social media for audiologist and speech language pathologist if they need to write papers and get grants out because that’s what they have to do right but I’m hoping that what Holly’s talking about becomes more than one because I just think that’s as important as all those other activities.
Megan: So I literally just made tenure like 1 and half month ago like September 2020and so all of the materials are very fresh. If you’re a junior person watching this and you do social media, I am happy to share all of my materials with you about how I did it.I had to tell a story, a very specific story, and there was some disagreement about whether or not it should go in my statement or not.And it’s just, and ultimately, it was part of my identity, like a big part of identity. And so I would, I completely agree that you have to be intentional about how you talk about it, give feedback about it.To Ryan’s point. I think it’s right. But it’s sad, and I think that what I’m trying to do in my PhD students is give them that development as PhD students who they don’t have to figure it out so that then when they write their pain.When they write their papers. It’s automatic that they’re tweeting about it. It’s automatic that they’re making a little video for Instagram, so they don’t have to do any of the operations, butI think that that should be part of how we are teaching doctoral students when they don’t have all the pressures that Ryan’s talking about the we.So if you are a PhD student or you are a junior faculty, please email me and I’m happy to share all the goodies. I want everyone to have them so that it’s because it was hard to figure it all out. Right. And I don’t want it to be hard for anybody else. And so I think we just need to help each other, watching each other.And andand hopefully the more people that find value in it, the easier it will be for the next generation.
Holly: And I would also just give a plug that although there’s maybe not a lot of current value or or incentive to do it. I think we absolutely have to do it because it really breaks down walls between researchers and clinicians. You know, I’ve been struck by again. It’s sort of like what I was talking about with trying to get into schools for research. When I go to conferences, you know, people know me from social media and so clinicians will approach me and I am approachable, because I’m on social media. And I’ve been surprised that people will email me, but they’ll talk to me on social media there now is just that where you can find me, you know, of course, you’re going to email me if you have a question about my article. Apparently that’s not a thing you know it’s it’s having that relationship on social media where it’s like, oh, she’s out there, she’s having conversations with people and some now I feel comfortable asking a question about an article or asking a clinical question or whatever it is.And so I think it is really important to be on social media, because it is a space where clinicians are it is a space where parents are. And so that’s our chance to really make that connection and form those kinds of partnerships that we need so that we can do the implementation work and stay current in the field.As Ryan said, you know, most of us are not practicing clinicians anymore, but we still need to have that connection to what’s going on in the field. So our work can be informative for them so. It does have real value and we just need the research side of our field to see the value of that and place some value in it as well.
John: I think you’re right about breaking down walls because you do see the strange clinicians saying all researchers have no idea what it’s like on the ground , they produce stuff isn’t relevant to us. We can’t implement it. And then some research is saying well clinicians just need to read the evidence more. They just need to want to use what’s out there was, we can bridge that neither one is true.And I don’t think all these methods I just tried to bridge that gap.
Kelly: I think the only other thing that I’ll add to, I totally agree with John. And the only other thing I’ll add some social media conversation is the fact that, for me, it has my social media presence had actually lead to opportunities that are more traditional so I’ve given guest lectures at different institutions, virtually but you know I this semester presented at North Dakotaat a University, just as a guest lecture so that guest lecture gets you know goes on my CV. I’ve been invited to speak at several different state associations, because they saw the things that I was posting on Instagram. So um, you know it does. Even though it seems like it’s not a traditional way to disseminate and maybe it’s not yet.I’m on board with Ryan that and hopefully we’ll move that way, but it has, for me at least led to some traditional opportunities as well. So I think there’s a lot of benefit in that.
Megan: I say one last thing. It’s also really scary to be to start in yourself out there on social media. And I want to say that out loud because it might look like.That it’s easy for me.It is painfully hard for me every video that I do, I just have to post it right away and I can’t look at it.And it’s about those relationships. Right. So I’mon days where I’m like, I’m, I’m talking about what it’s like in my crazy house with 4 young kids, and becausebecause then I become not necessarily a researcher, I become the crazy person who feeds their kids ice cream sandwiches sometimes for breakfast, because that’s all I handle and that you know, it’s funny because you can see the metrics and it’s interesting what attracts people and they to be partner into to really like understand something is a bi directional process right where you are with somebody and you they want to know that you also struggle and you’re not this version of the special snowflake up in academia, that we too feed our kids ice cream sandwiches for breakfast, because that’s all I do.
Ryan: Are we excited to get an invitation at breakfast at your house?
Trina: Yeah. That was excellent. It was so good. All of you. John, love all your comments. I love how you just pointed right at our research to practice gap.Right. And, you know, Sarah and I are on the Christian community and that is our, you know, our mission is really to to bridge this gapbetween research and practice we want, and we need to do that through evidence based practice and implementation science. And so the things that you all were talking about today are just like perfect, and I believe that there’s a lot in here for like junior researchers to be able to, maybe, you know, be a little courageous and stick their neck out a little bit, you know, you know, to be to put their toe in the waters of social media. I know that that’s been a challenge for me and just this last year I made lots of new social media accounts and I’m still not loving it. But, but I do see that there’s a clinical benefit because I have a ton of these young little speechy followers on Instagram, a ton of them, right. So I am in a way, way going to be able to impact that audience.So I’m learning and some, some of your examples have been really great models for me in, you know, producing new methods for dissemination. So I really appreciate it. I also really just appreciate your time spending that you spend your time today with us and gave us such great advice and I’m just super excited about all the great things you’re doing. I hope we all see more video models or video abstracts and, you know,Maybe we’ll be seeing Megan feeding her kids ice cream sandwiches. Or maybe you got some cereal for dinner. We have, we have brinnerat my house for dinner, all the time.But I really do appreciate the comments. And thank you so much for being here today in our panel.
Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. You guys are such busy people. So taking a little bit of time out to chat with us this super helpful. Thank you.
Kelly: Thank you for inviting us and for organizing
John: Thank you.
Ryan: Yeah, this was great.
Holly: Yeah, this is fun.
Trina: Good.Good. Good. All right. Thank you, everybody.
Sarah: Have a great night, everyone and a good day, John.
John: Thank you.
Trina: Bye everyone
Interview With Dr. Ianessa Humbert and Dr. Meredith Harold
Please note: The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Natalie: All right. Well, welcome back. And good afternoon, all of you. I am so happy to have Drs Harold and Dr. Humbert with us today. As I mentioned, in the earlier module. And we’re here to talk about what does it really mean to be someone who is a knowledge broker. So as a refresher.Knowledge brokers. They are the doers of knowledge and they increasingly are used to close that gap between research and practice. All the while, facilitating the development of relationships that are critical to effective knowledge translation and implementation so thank you both so much for coming. I’m so excited.
Ianessa: Thank you for having us.
Meredith: Yes, thank you.
Natalie:Alright, let’s dive right in so we’ll start with this question so either of you, whoever wants to take it. So how has your background and skills helped you in what you’re currently doing right now?
Meredith:umm, I can start with this one. So I have a fairly equal background as a school based SLP and in academia.Which has been an asset and I do think that, in general, within our field, we need to tap into those people kind of first when we’re looking for people to help bridge the gap between clinical practice and academia.Because they tend to be the people who kind of understand both sides a little bit. However, that being said, there’s a lot of people who are PhDs that are doing a lot of knowledge brokering whoever, really good role to play there.And I also know of clinicians who have very little science training, who are doing a really good job of knowledge brokering. In particular, if they’ve partnered with people with a science background and so you know, I think my background has been an asset but I definitely want to make sure that it’s stated that you don’t necessarily have to have a certain history or pedigree in order to take on this work.
Ianessa: Yeah.So my background is not mainly based on experiences I’ve had as part of becoming an SLP or getting a PhD.The background that matters to me is my obsession of understanding something that I want to call myself an expert on well. It matters to me that I know what I’m talking about. But I also don’t mind.Being wrong openly if I get to learn as part of that process just being wrong for the sake of being wrong. And then just being radical killed and nobody tells you the answer. Ever. That’s not so fun.But if you can learn as part of the process. I’m signed me up for it. So for me, I ended up working in an area. So my background is that I study swallowing primarily and I did little clinical work before and the clinical work I did was in the school system.ThenI did clinical work while I was getting my PhD while I was doing a postdoc while I was on faculty. So they were always hand in hand.Which meant one was always informing the other and that’s not typically the way it works. But the bottom line for me was I would be reading papers and I’m like, what the hell does this mean.
Natalie: Yeah, yeah.
Ianessa: And so I vowed I didn’t want to be the kind of person who wrote, who wrote words that sounded really nice and fancy. But the dissemination was a problem because literally art and I was at the NIH of the time and the NIH had just changed the rules where you know there’sPubMed Central now and that happened because taxpayers rightfully so, said, Wait, why are we paying twice. Twice for this information we paid for you to study, we pay for your salaries; you want to pay for this study.So then they said all NIH funded research has to be there. So the whole push for dissemination was big when I was training there, but it still didn’t break the barrier that these papers are written and hieroglyphics that only scientists sometimes can understand. And so for me I just was like, there’s no way I’m going to be able to be a scientist. If I can’t make things plain.
Natalie: Oh,wow I love that. So how would you describe to kind of go off of that. How would you describe what you do now to your friends and family?
Ianessa: So what I say is the first thing to get them to care which is I was studying swallowing. Nobody goes oh that boring. Ever. In fact, some days I wish they would right, but hopefully people are like, they, they’re like, like in here. I’m like that very spot every minute.Of them. Did you know and then usually they’re a little bit shocked and excited and that allows me then to further explain things, but I try my best to explain it in a way where they get something when they leave because I can’t stand to be bored and I can’t stand to go to a talk and spend all day in a meeting and be like, so what, was the point in that talk.I find that personally offensive.
Natalie: hmm.
Ianessa: If I go to somebody’s talk and they didn’t take the time to explain it, so people can understand. And I don’t think that they’re doing it on purpose.I think it’s the way we’ve been trained to talk to other scientists, because who decides if we get a paper, who decides if we get a grant? Who decides if we get a job?Who decides if we get the next talk? So we’re talking to the people who might go to the microphone and say something.We’re not talking for everyone to listen.And so I try to talk to even lay people in such a way where they pass on the right information instead of, say, you know, you got two pipes in your neck. Right. No, I didn’t say that definitely didn’t say that.
Natalie; What about you, Meredith? How would you describe what you do to your friends and family?
Meredith: I usually explain to them that in most fields, there’s tons of science that not enough people know about and that somebody has to serve the role of telling people about it. So whether it’s doctors, nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech language pathologists, in order to do our jobs and do a good job.We have to somehow make contact with the data in our field and I basically just tell them we help SLPs make contact with our fields research and they usually don’t ask me any questions after that. They’re like, what are you bringing to dinner on Sunday?
Natalie: That’s great. So, Meredith. This one is for you and you mentioned offline that you do constant incessant dissemination work which I loved. And so I was hoping that you could walk us through one of your days.
Meredith: Yeah, yeah
Natalie: Or two.
Meredith: So I run The Informed SLP and I’m a full time employee there, but we have almost 40 people who work there.And but the work I and the others do, is we read all of the research that’s in our field, we write upssummaries of it, we put it on the website, we crank it out on social media. So we spend a lot of time on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook,Pinterest. We spend our time on places where SLPs go that scientists don’t often think about like websites like teachers pay teachers were clinicians will go to look up information.Basically, we’re just trying to take our fields research and put it in locations where clinicians are. I often I spent a lot of time traveling to conferences too to talk about our fields research and talk about how to find it and understand itin normal years. Not this year. This year at all, just doing it from home, but all of the other projects that I spend my time on that don’t fit withinhe brand of The Informed SLP are also related to helping clinicians and scientists get more connected with one another and understand each other’s problems, barriers, questions, issues, everything. Like a recent project that I took on is a website called CS disseminate so it’s CSdisseminate.com and it’s with several other scholars who are all passionate about teaching Fellow scientists, how to legally self-archive.Because anyone who’s done any work in science communication and has close relationships with speech language pathologists who want to read our field research.Is usually well aware of how frustrating it is for those people. When they find a piece of information, know it’s published in this paper, try to get that paper and then hit a paywall and people around them generally don’t know what to tell them to do because the scientists don’t usually hit paywalls. And most clinicians aren’t regular leading regular regularly reading research and so CS disseminate is helping scientists figure out how to make that research more accessible to the people who want to read it. So it’s all work around that and it’s not enough, even though I do it full time and I know a whole bunch of other people who do part time work around this. It’s still not enough. A lot of people need to be, you know, thinking about this and contributing to it in order to really make a dent in it.
Natalie: Right. Ianessa, so what is the day for you look like?
Ianessa: Well, my days of changed drastically. It’s not because of COVID. So what I do now is I will. One of the things I do that you guys care about is I disseminate I create content forThe Swallowing Training and Education Portal. So that’s stepcommunity.com and we call it a community because we want for people to feel as though they can approach it anytime. So my background, as I said before, in swallowing means that I spent a lot of time going to very high end expensive meetings spending lots of money to go and bring my whole lab there.And I too was guilty of publishing papers where I found that there’s a 2.8 degree difference in vocal angle with electrical stimulation. I was like, yes, another paper baby and I was like, nobody cares. Like, nobody cares. It means nothing but it’s going to be on my CV. And over time, after years of giving talks.Just, you know, invited talks at a lot of institutions like sniffs hospitals. I went from the Dysphasia Research Society elite talk, where in seven minutes you have to explain your life and you got to do it well to two to three hours or two days interacting with clinicians and realizing, oh my god.That the chasm is massive. In terms of the kinds of things that this this elite group is talking about that will never move over to a clinician who may or may not know what to do with this information, but by the time you’ve read the paper, you don’t get it right and if you do, you’re like, Well, what do I do on Monday morning with my patient right now. Right.So what I did is I took a lot of my content from all the talksI’ve been giving them through an ASHFoundation grant as well to study SLPs to learn whether or not their decision theirdysphasia management decisions were sound.And we publish those data. We also had a meeting in person, where people actually came to the meeting, so we can study them and we publish those data as well. And what we learned is that clinicians are having a hard time differentiating differentiating even a normal swallow from a disordered swallow, like in a massive way.And so rather than saying, well, we got to go to ASHA and say you need to have more swallowing experts at these universities. Do you know how long it takes to make a me? There’s a lot of money and time right and we can’t have that many, but it’s the internet allows me to take the knowledge that I’ve gained over the years and my style of plain communication taking complex ideas and breaking them down. So a lot of people can understand and be interested by using the internet, right. So I went from being on faculty at a number of places. Up until this year recently deciding that I’m going to do this full time.And so that’s what I do. I do a lot of what Meredith does now, right, which is zooming a lot on social media lot trying to answer all the questions. Answering a lot of questions about the content I’ve created on step doing live symposia those kinds of things, all through the online, medium, and I have to say is very satisfying.Most scientists, there’s a there’s an interesting thing where, in at least in speech pathology in certain areas if your primary interest is to educate clinicians, nobody knows where you fit.If your primary interest is to let clinicians understand the research. It’s like, why can’t they just go read it themselves. I said it. Now, I understand.The years that I had to put into trying to get this information to be digestible, pun intended, and investableis significant. So there’s a need there. And I actually don’t lose anything by fulfilling it. I feel like I’m actually contributing beyond my paper of 2.8 degrees of vocal full movement right now.
Natalie: I’m getting chills. I’m in Michigan, with a sweater, but I still have chills because I’m hearing you talk about these issues that I, I’m not sure that people really openly talked about, or if they did, they did it in in quiet but now it is time to bring it out. So what advice would you give to maybe that PhD student or that person that is really resonating with what you’re saying, but maybe they don’t have the courage or the bravery that’s required to kind of go towards some of these places that are a little unknown yet.
Ianessa:Well, Meredith, I would say, first thing they need to do is listen to the episodes one through five of our podcast where we we riff on this so much. And so in such a relatable way.It’s called evidence and argument. You can go to evidenceandargument.com, it’s focused on CSD and this all started because Meredith had a post on your Facebook group about clinical research and you asked. I think it was for your CS disseminate where you said how many clinicians or how many scientists have their, their publications available on a website or something like that. And I think that’s the one I chimed in on the discussion and suite them like let’s let’s do a podcast.At the time it was going to be on my down the hatch swallowing podcast but we realize. It’s its own thing. This is the kind of stuff that people talk about that. You don’t even realize that people should be talking about. It’s just like before HGTV you never knew that there was a mother of pearl and eggshell, like, now you’re like talking all open concept like you’ve been knew about it, like, you know, before HGTV so I feel like we’re the gateway to this.To normalizing these conversations about the huge discrepancy and one that I will suggest Natalie at some point that you should bring on which is entrepreneurship and the industry partners that we sometimes demonize because we think that while they’re all about money, but really they’re an important broker in this conversation, but people don’t want to talk about it.
Meredith: I think it’s also under recognized within our field and how much clinicians and scientists don’t understand about what’s in each other’s brains and you know. I would like to see that be like a major take home of, you know, the segment with the three of us isI didn’t realize how much I didn’t understand about clinical practice until I moved out of academia and started working full time as a clinician.And I, my fellow clinicians, in general didn’t understand much about what our field science was for; where to get it; why it matters; how to understand it. And I think that really the key in our field is going to be to start to recognize that we all need to be collaborating, a lot more and having tough conversations about why we, you know, tend to operate in our own little corners of our field in order tomove things forward.
Ianessa: Perhaps it’s because we handle, as I’ve said before, two of the most basic human things that really make us human, which is communication and feeding.And frankly, we could own music because we have hearing and the larynx.
Natalie: Came across this field and my doctoral program of implementation science. I was like, you’ve got to be kidding me right now. There are people who have dedicated their profession across disciplines toaddress these issues and so it seems that from what we know from implementation science that if we want to truly implement best practices. They’re sort of this mash up of actions, on behalf of the individual and then actions on behalf of the organization. And so if we’re thinking about that in terms ofcommunication sciences and disorders. What do you think are some first steps of individual action and then maybe organizational level action to help us with our implementation?
Ianessa: My gosh. Meredith, we’re having an episode four again.Let you I’ll let you talk, Meredith.
Meredith: And so most of my work targets the individual. I don’t spend that much time targeting organizations and through my work not because It doesn’t need to happen, but because I just haven’t tried that yet. I haven’t tried going there.But I have found that it’s really important that when you’re communicating with individual SLPs having conversations about best practice, you know, disseminating our fields research to them, you know, picking at the problem, you have to have a lot of awareness of what the organizational barriers are otherwise you’ll come across to the clinician as not getting it. So I yeah so I spend a fair amount of time acknowledging that like acknowledging the barriers being like, you know, we all know that X is what’s best for the clients.There’s a good chance that your boss wants you to do Y because it’s cheaper or it’s because what’s always been done, you know, so we need to figure out how to work around that and I generally see that individuals as having the power to change the organizations to a certain extent.And so I haven’t tried specifically targeting at the organizational level, other than being involved in like State Association stuff like I do. Our State Association stuff just to kind of try to advocate for field and movelobbying efforts forward and stuff. But it is hard and every individual SLP response to pressure a little bit differently. Some people, you can sayOkay, we have evidence to suggest that this is best practice within this situation. Some people will look at that and say, oh, I wasn’t doing that before, maybe I could try that.Other people will look at you saying that and think that you’re attacking them or shaming them or making them feel guilty and so you kind of have to watch for that a little bit and kind of have this delicate balance of how much can I push; how deep can we get with this conversation without throwing up a roadblock; because it comes across as not understanding clinical reality that’s a common thing that I see is a real need to make sure you understand clinical reality when you’re having the conversations with people.
Natalie:Right now our baseline in CSD in how we move knowledge into practice?
Meredith: Um, well, I believe it comes earlier in this lecture because I know who else is talking about what other topics. And as long as somebody taught. Well, no, I was just gonna say somebody. Remember, whose slides. It is brings up the route Meghan Roberts paper from 2020 about the proportion of clinical practice research in our field in the first place, which their data suggests it’s around 25%Internal data from the Informed SLP when we’re looking at all the papers, we’re finding that around 5% of our fields research is immediately clinically applicable. So there’s a little bit of a problem there. When it comes to our field science being usable by clinicians in the first place. So I think that’s one of the baselines. But like I mentioned earlier, I honestly think the other baseline is inadequate collaboration between scientists and clinicians. What I want to see us move toward is a common identity between scientists and clinicians in our field that is a result of collaboration where once they start collaborating more suddenly they realize that they have so many shared interests and can help each other so much, but we’re just not there yet, because nobodythinks they’re incentivized enough to work together.
Ianessa: I do think that one thing we could do is understand what the clinicians really want across a discipline.And it can’t just be Meredith, and I you know this, but it has to be a systematic thing where we have to understand them and understand what scientists want. Because of collaboration really means that we tell a patient in my world. You do this protocol.And the patients like my patients are all different coming in. I can’t give them all the same stroke protocol. Well, science demands, everybody has the same protocol we already have a problem. Right. Right.
Meredith: Yeah, yeah.
Ianessa: Yeah, understanding those differences matters.
Meredith:Even setting up situations and we’re scientists and clinicians communicate and socialize with each other more would be helpful. You know what I mean. Like it doesn’t even have to be jumped straight into all right, we need to be doing studies more, we need to, you know, our work needs to be more intertwined, even just starting withcommunicating with each other and hanging out in similar spaces would be helpful.
Ianessa: Yeah, it would break the ice quite a bit. And it’s something that I like to do in the meetings that I’ve had where, you know. We’ll say, Okay, we’re all going to, you know, the local bar. And we’ve already gone to the bar and all the drinks are swallowing drinks. We have a barium bomber, we have an aspiration.Just because it got us in the same room and then afterward. Some of the result. The, the evaluations, but likeI was really nervous to talk to you. But then we had a real conversation. I was like, I’m going to change my approach on Monday.There’s no paper in the world that’s going to make somebody change your approach on Monday as quickly as theadding conversation. In addition to the science so hardcore evidence, but there’s also getting somebody relatable to help sell the product, right. So I think scientists are supposed to be helping to sell their science and push it.Not just to the person that immediate consumer, which is another scientist who will like them so they can get something. It also needs to benot impact factors in terms of citations and who cited it it’s who’s using it.
Meredith: Mm hmm.
Ianessa: If we had some kind of scale of who’s actually using it. That would be very useful.
Meredith: Oh, people are picking at that problem. It’s a little bit different, difficult to measure, though.
Ianessa:It is difficult to measure. It is and that’s why it’s important things are important.
Natalie: That’s right.That is that is right. But that’s, you know, it’s as you’re talking. I’m, you know, there’s just so many levels, but I hear you talking a lot about relationship and eliminating hierarchy. That’s what I hear from you.
Ianessa: And silos.
Natalie: And silos. Yes, yes, that is, that seems to cross all of these many different subjects that we’re talking about is the importance of that relationship to to truly move forward with some of these issues.
Meredith: Mm hmm. Yeah. People tend to think that knowledge brokering and science communication if they haven’t started doing it yet.Is all about gathering the information and putting it out there and gathering the information and putting it out there, but really it’s about people and relationships and communication.Then anytime you attempt to reach out and it falls flat, it’s because there’s some sort of people issue.That you neglect and that you know you’re not understanding how they’re understanding what you’re putting out there, you’re not, you don’t have a full enough understanding of their perspective. So you’re not presenting it in quite the right way. But it’s a it’s a people thing.
Ianessa: And have a meeting that is just about eating and drinking and breaking bread and having these conversations whereI’ve had these before. We call them, Think Tanks.Where you flip it on its head. Instead of having 90% formal talks and 10% questions because you know the question is the best part. Right. And we really hope someone’s like, oh, I know she’s gonna ask please look at any time I heard it.Right, I don’t, but I’ve had them where it’s 90% conversation you put out a provocative question and you let people in the room, jump in and just really get into the issue. And when I did one of these before.It was a swallowing ThinkTank. And the first question was, define a swallow. We had experts come in from all over the US and Canada. You know, we couldn’t define it a agreeably. That tells you something that we’ve not had that conversation. EVER. Wehad swallowologist meeting all the time. And we could not collectively define a normal swallow.I learned more from that first thing than any paper I could have read.
Meredith:Yeah.And flipping the norm on its head where you’re like, oh, I’m going to do something that’s not a conference presentation, I’m not just going to stand up on the stage and tell people stuff and then walk off the stage and go back to my hotel room.And it’s like the conversations, even though they’re intimidating and scary sometimes and doing more of those like social type events and activities.Are so rewarding like they’re the ones that you’re thinking about when you’re flying home on the plane after the conference and you’re like, Oh my gosh, like those three clinicians that I just had a conversation with completely changed the way I think I might need to tackle you know X, Y, or Z.
Ianessa: Meredith, you and I should do between two ferns, but we’re like this. Like the two ages, like the Harold Humbert factor. And then there are people in between us and we like riff off of what they’re saying. So I feel like we can talk about anything to anybody.
Meredith:Yeah.
Natalie: I would watch that showI would record all of them. That’s great. So what is your we’re, we talked a little bit about incentives right. And so the other kind of theme that I’m hearing in our conversation is,you know, researchers do not have an incentive to have external validity to a degree, right, because it’s it’s all, it’s a significant emphasis for tenure promotion to have internal validity and to get those papers and those high impact journals.So they don’t really have an incentive to necessarily move toward a clinician.A clinician doesn’t necessarily have an incentive to move towards science because it’s not going to necessarily make their day easier or improve outcomes, per se. So how can we create not necessarily just incentives. But how do we move toward these roads? How do we open up these roads to get us talking in those rooms with each other?
Ianessa:The first thing that comes to mind is the everybody has to come in declaring their biases. You go into if you’re a scientist going into a room full of clinicians, you probably have been told that they’re not going to follow the conversation. I have not found that clinicians are less intelligent than science scientists at all. What I find is that they’re the thing that makes them get excited is just different from the things that make us get excited. And so the things that make us get excited happen to live in something called an ivory tower which is supposed to be prestigious. And what they say, as well. I’m just a clinician, I’m in the trenches and I would argue, I was in the trenches and science too sometimes, you know, they mean not because I wanted to show how hard it is for me.I just want people to know that the trenches aren’t bad. And in fact, scientists could live in some trenches, where they actually had to really defend their position.Not because some other paper cited something, but because they actually have a point that’s relevant and meaningful. When a clinician sees a patient and they want this child to be able to pronounce this word or understand this concept or this adult to be able to eat this meal, that’s a life sustaining livelihood thing. They have to be driven by another human being. We don’t. So to me, those are the trenches that actually we need to understand more and the reverse could be true, which is okay. I know that your hearts in the right place as a clinician, but it’s not enough.Right, it’s not enough for your heart to be replaced your practice has to be the in the best practice realm.But if we’re able to come into a room and declare biases. All right. I think when I walk in this room and the clinicians aren’t going to do this and they’re going to too much of that and they’re going to say,I have a patient who and just want to know what to do that patient and just declare it. And they have to say the same thing, you’re going to think you’re better than me. You’re going to make me feel dumb, blah, blah, blah. Let’s just get that out of the way.Get it out and then we can have a conversation. But if we come in all this is great. We’re breaking bread together and then nobody actually really then we can say we did the activity.But did we really as Meredith, say you left that meeting, like, holy crap that conversation I had by accident at the airport. When we were all you know getting ready. I saw Dr so and so and we stood there for 10 minutes I took it with me everywhere. That to me is how you get there.
Meredith: And mentioned incentives. I don’t think that we necessarily either scientists or clinicians need to have monetary incentives in order to push things forward. And I think sometimes the monetary gains can come from growing in other ways, you know, both scientists and clinicians didn’t necessarily get into these jobs for the money right.We’re motivated by helping people, we’re motivated by learning and knowledge brokering work. It’s all learning and helping people and learning and helping people and it’s extremely rewarding. So any scientists that are wanting to take bits of that on. There’s a lot of highs within it like when people tell you, you know, oh my gosh, this is so helpful. Thank you. I didn’t know this existed. Like, I really appreciate it. Blah, blah, blah. Like that will sustain you for a few days. You know what I mean. And it get feel like it’s worth it again. When you spend another, you know,hour preparing some thread for Twitter that you want to push out to people.Because it’s sometimes it’s going to things are going to fall flat. Sometimes you’re going to reach out, you’re going to be like nobody’s listening, like, Am I doing this for nothing. But other times, you’re going to reach out to people and feelings and concepts and information are going to go viral within the community and you can be likeI took the time to do that. And now people are, you know, picking at this problem together so.
Natalie: Right, and what I’m hearing in this conversation as well. That’s so exciting to me is you are both inviting people to something new, as opposed to, let’s just tear the whole thing down. Right. It’s not just, let’s just tear it down because everything we’ve done is terrible. No, that’s not at all what you’re saying.You are saying, let me invite you to a different way, right, to something that is more rewarding more fulfilling that hasHigh levels of impact. So would you kind of tweak that invitation to certain audiences like let’s say you’re talking to a PhD student, how would you invite them to come alongside this type of work?
Meredith: Identify what types of conversations you want to have who you want to talk to and just start doing it.You don’t need to think about it. You don’t need to prepare for it. You just need to go out and start having conversations with people so that you can learn from them and they can learn from you and it can be wherever you’re comfortable. Like sometimes people are like,I don’t want to create an Instagram page don’t then, don’t you know if you’re comfortable on YouTube. If you’re comfortable on Twitter if you’re comfortable doing.Local talks like I’ve known a lot of people who have really huge impact in their city because they go to local talks with you know, mommy groups and talk about language development and stuff like that, any way that you can make contact with people that you think might bring you joy. You just need to start doing it. You just need to start making contact with people.
Ianessa:Yeah, I, I would also add that too. Some people call me things like the Pied Piper of like something because I’m seemed to be good at getting people to come along with some idea.But I would argue that the only reason I’m able to do that, it’s because I’m pulling from something that matters to me. So I could have studied swallowing. I could have studied eyeballs. I could have studied toe jam, I would have been the best toe jam expert on the planet. if that’s what I wanted to do but that’s because I pulled from my natural skill sets and put them out there.There are a lot of people who their skill sets may not be well suited to a world in science in the traditional way and they lose their way on the way to being an impact maker.Because they got caught up in what it looks like to get a PhD or what it looks like to be a scientist.And the process of becoming a scientist to me is like the process of becoming a clinician.Or an entrepreneur or a mom, you don’t know what it’s like until you’ve done it, and unless you’ve lost a lot trying to do it.You don’t regret it because becoming a scientist or becoming entrepreneur what or whatever it is.That process alone is makes you have the should have a level of deep introspection, that you can take with you anywhere you go.So if they’re pulling from something that they’re, they find themselves passionate about, or they know they’re passionate about.That will speak in far more volumes than will I signed up to study this. So that’s what I’m doing for 20 years now. Nobody’s nobody’s gonna be able to really connect with people. If you’re studying it because you always have.
Natalie:That’s right.Right, right. So I’m hearing that you want more people to join these efforts, right, what else, what are some other dreams? What would you like to see?
Ianessa: if you don’t love it. You hate it and people. People need to step back a second and say, what can I, what can I really, really learn from the situation? And is it really all about me.
Natalie: Um, some self-reflection.
Meredith: Yeah, yeah, self-reflection transparency collaboration. Yeah. A lot of people are under transparent with each other about the value they bring to our field and it ends up just being like, stuck within them, and we don’t go anywhere. So
Natalie: What yeah right empowering people to bring their, their gifts to what they love to bring to this profession. Without it, getting, you know, kind of sniffed out by whatever construct that they are kind of abiding by depending on whatever situation you’re in right.
Ianessa: Now actually wrote an article on medium through my company called Intervested, which focuses on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in communication sciences and disorders and I co created with Richie and we have an article called Dear 8% and 8% represents the people who do not self-identify as white as speech pathologist and audiologist and speech sciences, etc. And the, the plea, or the call to action was we can sit here and complain that we’re told to change our accents and our hair and we’re told that you know difference in dialect or whatever the issue is. You can go in and say that that’s a real thing. I’m not minimizing that it’s a real thing. However, in the face of strife people made blues and jazz and hip hop and all these other things because there was nothing else but their creativity, which couldn’t be stifled so that you have something really good to offer to the field. If you believe it on yourself. You can’t wait for the 92% assured along. I mean, that’s. Really ASHA has a construct where they’ve been putting money into multicultural stuff only for us to only get to 8% after decades. So the people who want this initiative and have the funding for it and can fast track it can’t get it. It’s because there’s a listening problem and if there wasn’t a listening problem, they would actually know that the 8% know what they need.It doesn’t need to come through your filter for you to approve what I know I need. So it’s obviously not going to work the other 8% or via the 92% so let’s make the 8% do their gig and maybe it’s maybe that’s one category, maybe it’s something you study, maybe it’s that you’re an outsider in any way. That’s okay. But whatever minority idea, you have that creative push it first before you stomp it down because people might not like it.
Meredith: Yeah, yeah. We can’t be afraid of each other.
Ianessa: That’s right.
Natalie: Yes. So are there any other key resources that you’d like to share? You mentioned the podcast Evidence and Argument.
Meredith:We mentioned CSdisseminate.com for people who are looking for, you know, ways to make sure that clinicians can get their hands-on research.And I would say in general if you’re interested in doing specifically more science communication and more knowledge brokering but science communication in particular that you don’t need to necessarily go to science communication websites and workshops and stuff like that. You need to go to marketing websites workshops. And if you love marketing as much bigger older and better funded and everything that’s within science communication is basically marketing with the science as the topic.And I found that for me within our field a lot of the science communication stuff tends to actually be a little bit too specific, where it’s like how to convince people about you know X, Y, Z regarding climate change, you know. And I’m like,Okay, I can pull something from this, but if you go straight to marketing information. It’s all about buy-in communication making change happen, all that type of stuff. And I think it’s much easier to apply within our field so consumer marketing content. If your goal is to create change.
Ianessa: Mm hmm. That’s interesting. I didn’t know about. I always find Meredith is the best person to let me know that some random thought I had actually lives out in the world. There’s a whole field dedicated to it. No clue because I was just gonna say that I’ve actually changed my approach from let me just tell you how swallow works toI have a masterclass now and the whole first section is briefing everything you thought, you know.It’s just like, just get back to a fresh Canvas so you can actually be porous an uptake new stuff.You have to clear out all the old stuff to uptake new stuff. And this is hard work to do. It’s really hard to get people to realize what their biases are and then go from there. It’s easier just to because what they’re going to do is they’re going to take that step and say, right, but I already think this and make it wrong. So anything that people can learn where to get an opportunity to just take a pause and clear out the cobwebs and kind of rethink which is I think what why Evidence and Argumentis exciting because it’s all the things that people kind of have in the back of their head that they never set out and we’re just saying it. We’re just like reading the scrolls or the hieroglyphics, and everybody. Put her there anyway.So that’s why it’s exciting because you know i know we thought that too, but nobody’s saying it. So those kinds of resources are always better than a tell you what to do protocol flow chart tables type situation.
Natalie: Right, right. So is there anything that I neglected to ask you about this topic that you would like to buy week and
Meredith: Yay.
Ianessa: We’re over the hump day. So you’ve had plenty a week.
Natalie: Yeah, I mean, this just gives me so much hope for the profession. I do. I think we like I love closing with we are capable so
Meredith: And listen to clinicians. That’s the only final message it out there. Listen to clinicians.
Ianessa: And declare your biases.
Natalie: We are capable to clear your biases. Listen to clinicians. All right, thank you both so much. This was fantastic.
Meredith:Right.
Ianessa:Thanks for inviting us.
