WILLIAM WADLAND, MD, MS HENRY BARRY, MD, MS MINDY SMITH, MD, MS BARBARA YAWN, MD, MSC LEE GREEN, MD, MPH East Lansing, Michigan, Rochester, Minnesota, and Ann Arbor, Michigan From the Department of Family Practice, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI (W.W., H.B., M.S.); Olmsted Medical Center, Rochester, Minnesota (B.Y.); and the Department of Family Medicine, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (L.G.). The authors report no competing interests. Address reprint requests to William Wadland, MD, MS, B101 Clinical Center, Department of Family Practice, Michigan State University, East Lansing MI 48824-1315. E-mail: william.wadland@ht.msu.edu.
Clinicians and patients must help define the research agenda, help to frame the important questions, and participate in the research for the trials to have meaning. How can they become involved when researchers and clinicians have no venue for these conversations?
Researchers need a venue to share their ideas with clinicians. Researchers want to see their work applied. They need to know whether their questions are of importance to the end users so they can design meaningful studies. Perhaps most importantly, they have to learn what questions the clinicians are asking in their practice, and attempt to answer them. Talking to other researchers and journal editors is not enough.
Researchers need a connection to the real world of practice as a means of expanding their “research laboratory” and as a reality check.
Educators must address the need to develop future researchers and change the perceived value of family medicine research to the future generations while continuing to nurture good clinical practice and skill acquisition.
Just as the Europeans recently created a single currency in the “Euro,” the time is right for us in family medicine to strengthen our discipline by creating a single scientific assembly for all North American family physicians. Certainly the size of such a united meeting is daunting, the logistics difficult, and the inertia great. But imagine a meeting during which practice-informed, practice-based research findings are presented to an audience of researchers, educators, and clinicians. Following the usual methodologic queries by peer researchers, a moderator might lead a discussion of the clinical application of the findings and of implementation strategies. This group process would then identify the next research question. Thus we would have research informing clinical practice informing research, with the educators providing a bridge to the future.
