Dear Dr Marsteller,
We are thrilled to read with great enthusiasm the commentary by Matulis and Manning, titled "Supporting the Pursuit of Quality Improvement Publication: What Your Organization Can Do Now."1 At our organization, a large academic teaching hospital in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, we have integrated a Practice-Based Research and Innovation (PBRI) portfolio within professional practice to foster, build, and support a culture of research and scholarship (including quality improvement [QI]) across the health professions.2 As part of our strategic priority plan, our program has committed to purposefully establish a priority on knowledge dissemination-more specifically, to adopt a knowledge-to-action approach that conceptualizes knowledge translation as encompassing knowledge synthesis, dissemination, exchange, and adoption. As part of the operational activities to support this priority, our team has cocreated activities mirroring the framework proposed within the Driver Diagram.1
We reflect on the 3 primary drivers identified1 in relation to our strategy and, more specifically, the activities we have implemented to operationalize our strategic priorities:
Primary driver 1: Early, realistic assessment of scholarly ambitions. We currently include team research goals as part of an annual needs assessment for each of our health professional teams.3 A gap within our program is the integration of early assessment of scholarly goals among our health professionals. This commentary1 has inspired a commitment to implement a more structured approach to evaluating the scholarly goals of each of our health professionals as they are recruited to our organization. This will provide our team with a very purposeful and customized professional plan for each of our team members. Moreover, this will identify other resources and supports that are needed to provide more fulsome activities within our program to support the goals of research and scholarship specific to publication.
Primary driver 2: Manuscript preparation formalized as part of project work. One of our flagship programs building research and scholarship among health professionals at Sunnybrook is an annual fellowship program4 to support the completion of QI projects. Within the program, we have formalized manuscript preparation as part of the curriculum. Moreover, more recently we have included manuscript submission as one of the long-term deliverables of the fellowship program within the agreement for each of our fellows before starting the program.
Primary driver 3: Provide resources supporting QI publication. In 2017, our program initiated 2 novel learning opportunities that both indirectly and directly support the publication process. The first program used an interactive learning model to develop a program to enhance scholarly practice. The program comprises 15 modules that focus on the foundational skills of the research process from developing a research question through to publication. The second program was the development of a "Writing Cafe" to support authors through the entire publication process from journal identification to final publication. The group meets regularly over the course of a 4-month period for 1 hour to learn about the publication process, discuss their own progress, leverage peer expertise, and provide peer editing. In between meetings, participants work on the preparation of their manuscript and peer edit. In addition, as part of our tracking of publications, we disseminate a quarterly report in the form of "Kudos" to highlight the scholarly activities of our health professionals, and along with that an annual award to recognize the highest-impact publication by one of our teams.
We congratulate the authors1 and thank them for sharing this work with us as a confirmation of the steps our team has taken to develop a more integrated approach to the expectation of publication.
Respectfully submitted,
-Lisa Di Prospero, MRT(T), MSc
Director
Practice-Based Research and Innovation
Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Department of Radiation Oncology
Temerty Faculty of Medicine
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
-Sara Morassaei, MSc
Program Manager
Practice-Based Research and Innovation
Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
School of Rehabilitation Therapy
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
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