Not transition this time, but the whole focus of academia. Do we need to shift the everyday focus of research from universities producing complex lab science to every heath care provider being both an intelligent consumer and local producer of relevant research?

For instance: which the following spend the greatest proportion of revenue on R&D (in Europe) in the following sectors:

Automotive is about 6%, software/internet at about 17%, and you may be surprised to learn that Health comes second, with about 12% of funding spend to R&D.

In the UK NHS the target is 1.5% (and yes, that decimal point is correct), but we also need to think about what type of research do we do, and how do we use this research? For those of you who have done research, what proportion of your resource (££, $$ or just time) did you use/plan in dissemination to users? How did you think you could move the use of your answers onward to better the care of children & young people?

There’s a cogent argument in the pay-wall protected Journal of Health Policy & Services that describes a slow change to focus on knowledge implementation as being part of research, not part of someone else’s job, along with the challenges that have made research in the UK more difficult. Knowledge mobilisation is part science, part social psychology, part sales & marketing and partly showmanship and luck. A more formal approach to the embedding of it within doing research may make our efforts more meaningful and our clinical jobs better and easier.

– Archi