King’s Improvement Science

21/11/2022

Blog: Carlos Treichel shares his experience of collaborating with Louise Hull to develop ImpRes-BR

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In this blog Carlos Treichel, a postdoctoral researcher at the State University of Campinas in Brazil explains how the collaboration with Dr Louise Hull, King’s College London on the Portuguese version of ImpRes came about.

I am part of a research group called Interfaces, which is linked to the department of public health at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). In 2017, we were invited by the Health Secretary of a municipality called Itatiba (which has around 120,000 inhabitants), to assist in the implementation of matrix support in mental health, a type of shared care initiative.

 

In this way, we understood that we could benefit from the knowledge of implementation science and started to study this field to design our project.

Although we had extensive experience in planning and evaluating health interventions and policies, the field of implementation research was new to us. Therefore, it was difficult to identify and assimilate the literature in this field and apply it in the development of our project. We were always in doubt as to whether we were covering all the relevant aspects of this type of research, a feeling that was exacerbated by the lack of materials in Portuguese and sensitive to our context.

It is worth mentioning that in Brazil, only 5% of the population speaks English, with only 1% being fluent. Thus, it is not uncommon that even in academic environments, people have difficulty accessing the knowledge of implementation science, which is mainly produced and published in English-speaking countries.

Developing understanding of implementation science

Seeking to deepen my knowledge and qualify my studies in the field of implementation, I became aware of the Centre for Implementation Science (CIS) at King's College London, where I had the opportunity to join as a visiting researcher in 2019. During the six months I spent at the CIS, I was able to talk to researchers who introduced me to the ImpRes Tool.

Knowing the ImpRes Tool enabled me to greatly qualify both my project and my studies in the field of implementation science. In addition, when presenting the tool to my colleagues in the research group, we had the opportunity to make an important review of the implementation project we were conducting, qualifying it, and making it more rigorous.

Based on this experience, I understood that the use of ImpRes could significantly benefit other Brazilian researchers. However, for them to get the most out of it, it would be important to translate and adapt the tool and its guide to the Brazilian context. Thus, I got in touch with Dr Louise Hull, who promptly made herself available to collaborate on this project.

The translation and validation of the tool and its guide was proposed as my postdoctoral project and was funded by The São Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP, through grant nº 2020/14309-7.

Why the tool and guide would be particularly useful to researchers in Brazil

The field of implementation science is still not widespread in Brazil and there is very little literature available in Portuguese, with none dedicated to project design or implementation research. The tool and its guide in Portuguese will be useful to guide the design of projects and even the study of this field, introducing the user to indispensable literature in this field.

How ImpRes-BR will be disseminated/promoted

The tool will be disseminated through the production of scientific papers, presentations at congresses and events in the area, in addition to an introductory course to implementation research, prepared on the domains of ImpRes, and offered remotely to professionals and researchers from all over the country. The tool and its guide will also be hosted on our university's institutional repository and our research group's website.

Download ImpRes-BR 

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