Eleanor Jackson Bowers, PHC RIS
PHC RIS has had an ongoing interest in assessing the impact of primary health care research and in facilitating the use of research in policy making. During 2009, with three major reform strategies occurring and all their consultation documents, submissions and reports being publicly available we have an exceptional opportunity to establish what contribution primary health care research and researchers have made to the Australian health reform effort.
PHC RIS have examined the involvement of primary health care researchers as commissioners and as authors of commissioned papers and submissions and after a huge data entry effort, we have a data set of over 8 000 references cited by the hundreds of submissions and 26 commissioned papers informing the three strategies. This includes 3 385 citations to journal articles, and 1 421 to documents from Australian non government organisations, including university departments. Citations in the final reports will be harvested as they become available.
To identify citations to primary health care research we are using a definition from the PHCRED program:
“PHC research is based on the organisation and delivery of first contact, usually ongoing, health and medical care in the General Practice setting and in Aboriginal Medical Services; and broader health and medical care in the community to individuals and their families by community nurses, allied health practitioners and community pharmacists.”
To our knowledge, this project is unique in the study of research translation. While our project is primarily concerned with identifying the use of primary health care research, the data set has the potential to be used in future studies of research use or to examine the citation rate of individual authors, publications, journals or organisations.
Coding and analysis is currently in progress and a report will be available by the end of the year.
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