Regular readers of the Injury Prevention blog will be quite familiar with my obsession for getting our rigorous research translated into policy and practice. I regularly hear from individuals in industry and government, not to mention the general community, that researchers are great at communicating with other researchers, and not so great at communicating with ‘normal people’. Upon hearing this I have decided to create one-page summaries of my journal articles and conference papers, in plain English, summarising for the ‘normal person’ what I did, what I found, and what it means for them.

So you can understand my delight at reading an article published in a recent edition of Social Science & Medicine (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24632115). Zardo, Collie and Livingstone decided to wrangle with the twofold problem of getting research translated into policy and practice: “identify external factors that affect policy and program decision-making, and use this evidence to inform targeting of interventions aimed at increasing research use (in the context of injury prevention and rehabilitation compensation in Victoria, Australia)”.

Interestingly the interviews with employees from two state government agencies revealed that the following stakeholders were most influential, suggesting that researchers need to target these stakeholders if they are to be influential in  government policy and practice.

* the Minister and the government,

* lawyers, and

* agency stakeholders, including health providers, trade unions, and employer groups.

I love the idea of working smarter, not harder!