G4 – “We Can Talk for 5 Minutes Over Lunch, But It’ll Probably Get Interrupted:” How To Engage Frontline Stakeholders in Research or Evaluation Efforts

Summary

In this presentation, which was supported by CFHA’s REC Fellowship Program awarded to the first author, we will describe an ongoing research project wherein we aim to adapt Wittink’s (2016) Collaborative Care intervention to VA integrated care teams. For this presentation we specifically focus on our methodology and recruitment strategies used to engage busy primary care teamlets (comprised of PCPs and nurses) in qualitative interviews. Engaging clinical providers in research and evaluation is key to using evidence-based methods to inform practice, including the development and treatment evidence-based treatments. However, care providers are among the most difficult individuals to recruit for research and to assist in data collection for evaluations, with primary care clinicians having some of the poorest recruitment outcomes. Though scant, there is empirical evidence describing some of the strategies known to improve engagement with clinical research and evaluation efforts. These include promoting buy-in and interest, developing front-office rapport, identifying champions, recruiting on-site rather than remotely, and using technology when possible. In this presentation, we will add our own experience with recruiting primary care teamlets (comprised of nurse and PCP), front-line admin staff, and administrative leadership in rural, remote clinics for brief qualitative interviews, and provide evidence-based tips and tricks to increasing provider engagement with research and evaluation projects. We will review the literature on the recruitment of busy healthcare professionals, and then describe our tips, tricks, and lessons learned in attempting to employ evidence-based strategies to optimize our study design and recruitment strategies. Participants will leave with a Provider Recruitment Flowsheet and a better understanding of the efforts we all need to take in order to engage key stakeholders in our research and evaluation efforts. We will first briefly describe the Collaborative Care intervention and our research aimed toward adapting it, in order to give the audience a framework to understand our recruitment efforts. Next, we will review the literature on recruiting healthcare professionals for research as well as to assist in evaluation projects, and will introduce the Provider Recruitment Flowsheet that will be developed for this presentation. We will then discuss the specific strategies that we used to enhance recruitment, including a staggered interview question format, use of instant messaging, oversampling, use of recruitment-enhancing informational materials, and in-person recruitment, and the success or failure rate of these strategies in our work. We will finish with a question-answer period and any audience feedback on their own recruitment strategies.