Improving Communication Between Researchers and Policy Makers in Long-Term Care

Abstract

Laurence G. Branch, PhD For five years, we have been the national program office for the Home Care Research Initiative, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded program that supports research and analysis intended to improve the knowledge base underlying policies affecting home- and community-based services (HCBS). The initiative has aimed at developing knowledge about more effective strategies for allocating dollars, targeting services, and promoting delivery system efficiency in order to expand access to high-quality HCBS. In our efforts to make the findings of our commissioned work readily accessible to the policy-making community, we have experimented with a number of dissemination strategies and have come to appreciate the complexity of tailoring information for use by different policy audiences. Thus, we decided to explore the issue of dissemination more systematically, by talking with state long-term care (LTC) policy makers about their research information needs and looking at the activities of groups that actively communicate LTC information (see Appendix, Note 1). We supplemented this "environmental scan" by convening a group of LTC researchers and policy makers to discuss our findings. This forum article reports on the lessons and recommendations that emerged from this process and makes the case—based on the interviews and discussions reported herein—for support of information "brokers" to synthesize, translate, and disseminate important policy-relevant findings for LTC.