Cross-Disciplinary Research in Cancer: An Opportunity to Narrow the Knowledge–Practice Gap

Abstract

Health services researchers have consistently identified a gap between what is identified as “best practice” and what actually happens in clinical care. Despite nearly two decades of a growing evidence-based practice movement, narrowing the knowledge–practice gap continues to be a slow, complex, and poorly understood process. Here, we contend that cross-disciplinary research is increasingly relevant and important to reducing that gap, particularly research that encompasses the notion of transdisciplinarity, wherein multiple academic disciplines and non-academic individuals and groups are integrated into the research process. The assimilation of diverse perspectives, research approaches, and types of knowledge is potentially effective in helping research teams tackle real-world patient care issues, create more practice-based evidence, and translate the results to clinical and community care settings. The goals of this paper are to present and discuss cross-disciplinary approaches to health research and to provide two examples of how engaging in such research may optimize the use of research in cancer care.

Trainees’ Self‐Reported Challenges in Knowledge Translation, Research and Practice

“…KT is an interdisciplinary field of practice and research, which can be challenging for trainees to engage in considering that academic education—both for researchers as well as health professionals—has historically been discipline‐bound (Golde & Gallagher, ) and continues to be so. Building trustful and productive relationships across disciplines takes time (Urquhart, Grunfeld, Jackson, Sargeant, & Porter, ). Given their career stage, many KT trainees in both research and practice environments may lack foundational relationships necessary for fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration.…”

A critical realist synthesis of cross-disciplinary health policy and systems research: defining characteristic features, developing an evaluation framework and identifying challenges

“…However, depending on the degree of cross-disciplinary integration, the research questions may differ across the involved disciplines (multidisciplinary health policy and systems research (MDHPSR)), may be shared between disciplines or have been mutually agreed upon (interdisciplinary health policy and systems research (IDHPSR) and transdisciplinary health policy and systems research (TDHPSR)). Some of the articles argue that combinations of findings from different monodisciplinary studies about a common health problem, which were not conducted in a predetermined •Co-design, co-investigation and cocreation limited to participating disciplines [22,57,74] •Philosophy of transient and intermittent conceptual, theoretical and methodological integration [55,75] •Focuses on explicit exchange of perspectives, concepts and methods [68,74], reciprocal discipline-specific action [54,60] •Integration traverse stakeholder, disciplinary, organisational and professional boundaries [20,53,59,67] •Formative scientific team [20,52,77] •Co-design, co-investigation and co-creation over disciplinary limits [20,52,67,74] •Philosophy of flexibility and ongoing integration in response to new information about the problem [20,28,74] •Reflects robust systematic interplay between research stakeholders (academic and nonacademic) and elements (design, data collection and analysis) of the research [20,76,78] Outcome •More basic than action-oriented output [13,75,79] •Output is the sum of individual evaluations [21,23,70] •Diverse perspectives to the topic being studied [13,21,…”

“…Statement of expected cross-disciplinary outcomes [26,52,57,62,93,97] Are the expected cross-disciplinary outcomes of the research explicitly stated?…”

“…Extent of cross-disciplinary knowledge integration [13,19,22,52,67,68,70,71,76] To what extent (high/medium/low) does the study cross diverse disciplines or fields?…”

Clinical Research in Surgery: Threats and Opportunities

“…Examples include the numerous institutes for biomedical engineering worldwide, where the collaboration of engineers, surgeons, and basic scientists enhances the depth and quality of surgical research. Also, the integration of multiple academic disciplines and nonacademic individuals into clinical research may help to tackle real-world patient care issues, create more practice-based evidence, and help close the gap between trial-derived knowledge (best practice) and actual patient care [63]. …”