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Introduction1
Workshop Objective: To introduce the concept of implementation science to health professional educators to consider its potential use in the classroom and the clinical learning environment.
Implementation science is a growing and critical topic in health professions education, said Toby Brooks, program director and an associate professor in the Master of Athletic Training Program, Texas Tech University Health Science Center. He explained that implementation science can be thought of as the study of “what works, for whom, and when.” In 2021, the Global Forum on Innovation in Health Professional Education of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a workshop on lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic (NASEM, 2022). During the closing session of the workshop, said Brooks, participants began discussing the need to talk about implementation science more in depth. The idea “struck a nerve” and got people excited, asking “If we can apply evidence in our clinical practice, why can’t we apply evidence in our teaching?” The answer, he said, is we can and we should.
Following this discussion, Forum members elected to take on a workshop addressing implementation science in health professions education as
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1 The planning committee’s role was limited to planning the workshop, and the Proceedings of a Workshop has been prepared by the workshop rapporteurs as a factual summary of what occurred at the workshop. Statements, recommendations, and opinions expressed are those of individual presenters and participants, and are not necessarily endorsed or verified by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and they should not be construed as reflecting any group consensus.
per the statement of task (Box 1-1). The National Academies’ approval of the statement of task set in motion planning for the workshop, Exploring the Use and Application of Implementation Science in Health Professions Education, which was held in-person and virtually on three separate dates. In her opening remarks on June 15, 2022, Nasreen Jessani, senior researcher, Center for Evidence-Based Health Care, Stellenbosch University, South Africa, commented that workshop participants were at different levels of understanding with respect to what implementation science is, thereby affecting how it might be viewed within health professions education. Researchers use implementation science to speed the movement of findings into action, whether policy, practice, or advocacy, and some educators use implementation science to improve their pedagogy, she said, but it is not widely integrated into health professions education. Jessani expressed her hope that participants who are health professional educators would leave the workshop feeling “inspired and empowered” to incorporate implementation science into their teaching. Brooks added a warning for participants: “Once you start to open this box, your teaching practices are never going to be the same.”
ORGANIZATION OF THE PROCEEDINGS
Chapter 2 of this workshop proceedings describes and defines implementation science as presented by Raechel Soicher, an instructor in the School of Psychological Science at Oregon State University. Based heavily
on an article published by Soicher and colleagues (2020), this presentation served as background for the rest of the workshop and a foundation on which to explore this topic. Chapter 3 builds on concepts presented in the second chapter and features a presentation and a panel discussion that elaborated on how implementation science can be applied, its potential use in health professions education (HPE), and the state of evidence for several pedagogical approaches. Chapter 4 describes a breakout group activity in which workshop participants discussed a logic model in small groups in an effort to better understand the process of doing implementation science. Chapter 5 presents reflections and final thoughts of participants and planning committee members. Appendix A contains a list of references, and Appendix B contains a list of the members of the Global Forum on Innovation in Health Professional Education. The full workshop agenda can be found in Appendix C, and speaker and planning committee member biographies are located in Appendix D. Workshop materials are laid out in Appendix E.
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