This document discusses a case study of how a public health unit engages with and uses academic research. It finds that the public health unit values research that has been aggregated and synthesized by intermediary organizations. These intermediaries include the WHO, CDC, and other public health agencies. They play an important role in synthesizing large bodies of research and packaging it for direct use. Without these intermediaries to filter and translate research, the public health unit would struggle to directly make use of individual research studies.

1. The Role of Intermediaries
in Research Impact
An Ethnographic Case Study of a
Public Health Unit
Amy Lemay
OISE, University of Toronto

2. Gratefully acknowledge the financial
support from CASRAI and Mitacs
Accelerate

3. Outline
• Intermediaries, the use of research and
research impact
• Case study
• Research use value chain
• Mandatory Food Handler Certification
• Interpretation & Implications

4. Intermediaries - Use of Research-
Impacts
• Need to be aware of the range of uses of
research for accurate, meaningful impact
assessment
• The importance of intermediaries in the use
of research emerged recently as critical to
improving the uptake of research -
maximizing the impacts of research

5. Research & Transformational
Change
• Direct links between researchers and
users shown to improve use of research
leading to increased impacts
• Substantive, transformational change
unlikely to be facilitated by closers links
• Research must be aggregate/synthesized
with other elements (social, political)

6. Advocacy Oriented Intermediaries
• Third sector organizations (health charities,
advocacy organizations) often include
knowledge brokering/mobilization in
mandate
• Emerging evidence that uptake of research
can be limited by absence of strong
advocacy-oriented audience for research
• Advocacy organizations serve as focal
points around which researchers and
research coalesce

7. CASE STUDY
• Ethnographic case study of a public
health unit in Ontario: direct
observation, interviews, document
review
• How do staff engage with and make
use of academic research?
oWhat is the role of intermediaries?

8. Research Use Value Chain
The use of research emerged within a
complex, multi-directional value chain
where research is continually further
processed: (re)aggregated,
(re)synthesized,(re)interpreted to add value
for an equally complex and diverse network
of hybrid intermediary-users.

9. Preferred Engagement with
Research
PHU valued the academic literature and
showed a strong preference for
aggregated, synthesized bodies of
knowledge produced by intermediaries

10. Intermediaries
• World Health Organization
• American Heart Association
• International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation
• Public Health Ontario
• Public Health Agency of Canada
• Centres for Disease Control
• Canadian Institute for Health Information
• Ontario Tobacco Research Network
• Health Canada
• CBC
• Public Health Units (e.g. epidemiologists)
• Academic Researchers
• Expert Committees
• Professional Associations (Ontario Food Protection Association)

11. Role of Intermediaries
“So basically, it’s a way of -- rather than each
and every EMS system trying to pore through
research itself, it's all...synthesized and
packaged up for you…So rather than trying to
do it the other way around, everything
independently looking at the research and
then getting together and try and
recommend best practices, you’ve got the
researchers getting together...determining
what's appropriate, that turns into guidelines
and then comes down to us as best
practices...”(Manager)

12. Mandatory Food-handler
Certification
• Business case presented to Board of
Health cited a 2000 WHO document that
synthesized the body of knowledge on
food safety education
• More than 200 citations, many from the
peer-reviewed academic literature,
dating back to late 1960s

13. WHO Document: Synthesis of Body of
Knowledge

14. WHO document still cited
• Search of Google scholar shows the WHO
(2000) document has been cited in the
recent peer-reviewed literature:
• Sufen, Lui et al (2015). Knowledge, attitude and
practices of food safety amongst food handlers in
the coastal resort of Guangdong, China. Food
Control 47:457
• Konar, N., et al (2014) Street milk and urban
consumers in Turkey: a descriptive study. Journal of
Consumer Protection and Food Safety. 9(1): 23.

15. Interpretation
• Intermediaries may be better understood as
hybrid intermediary-users where…
• Further processing of research decouples it
from its origins making it difficult to assess and
attribute impact, highlighting …
• Importance of the academic literature in
creating a “legacy of the research” that
allows…
• Ongoing, continual processing that extends
impacts long after research is completed
and…
• Contributes to the system of scientific
knowledge – representing what can be
known and knowable in the future

16. Implications
Impacts of research decoupled from
researcher by further processing by
intermediary-users could represent a
significant source of long-term impact

17. Questions?