Facilitators and barriers to establishing a Researcher-in-Residence model
| Facilitators | Barriers | |
|---|---|---|
| Health service | The imperative to address major organisational funding and quality improvement challenges A desire to form outward-looking partnerships to address broader challenges of population health improvement A need to understand whether and how an intervention is making a difference (health and economic benefits) A desire to allocate resources to interventions and service development in an evidence-informed way | Creating the time to engage with and help develop the model Willingness and/or ability to fund the model Concerns that academics may not recognise the nature of decision making in practice |
| Academia | Growing need for academic institutions to demonstrate their utility to government and other funders Opportunity to meet the desire of some academics to ‘make a real difference’ Opportunity to address the desire of universities to engage with their local communities Changes in university funding mechanisms which are starting to reward ‘impact’ | Academic measures of success (peer reviewed publications, grant income, research training fellowships) may not be met by engaging with the model Risk that an embedded researcher may feel that their independence is compromised Willingness of major research funders to support highly applied work Concerns about compromising scientific integrity and willingness to accept that the most successful solution is not necessarily the ‘best’ solution from an academic point of view Concern that practitioners are not interested in empirical evidence |