Transfer of research into practice: development and implementation of a methodology for measuring the quality of palliative and hospice care in the Czech Republic
Abstract
The article focuses on the approach to, and the results of, the transfer of research into practice using the example of the development and implementation of a methodology for measuring the quality of palliative and hospice care in the Czech
Republic. The first part of the article is devoted to the background to the rapidly developing research on the disseminati- on and implementation of knowledge into practice (D&IR), and presents the RE-AIM monitoring and evaluation frame- work. The second part of the paper evaluates the implementation of the new methodology into practice using the RE-
AIM framework. It concludes that user involvement in the development of the toolkit has proved to be successful and its implementation has led to changes in the perceptions of hospices of statistics and adjustments to certain internal pro- cesses. It appears that although not all the implementation steps were fully realised and adherence to deadlines was low, this flexibility factor may, in fact, represent an advantage in practice. On the other hand, if the results of the methodolo- gy are not presented and discussed with hospices, the perception of the outcomes is likely to be problematic. Overall, the newly developed methodology has the potential for dissemination into practice