Putting our own message into practice: Lessons from previous work on knowledge exchange in social care

Here at the Social Care Evidence in Practice (SCEiP) project we have been highlighting how social care research all too often can fail to make an impact on the real world and, at worst, can be left unloved on dusty shelves. In these cash-strapped days, it’s especially important to make the most of research that already exists as well as developing the evidence base where gaps are visible. And this is no less true in our own field of endeavour – working to understand what contributes to successful knowledge exchange between researchers, practitioners and policymakers. ‘Knowledge exchange’ may be the vogue phrase of the moment, but it’s hardly a new concept. So we don’t want to find ourselves retreading old ground in the work we’re doing at SCEiP. Is there, for instance, useful past research on the knowledge exchange process that hasn’t properly seen the light of day?