Strengthening clinician-researchers’ communication and knowledge translation skills: An innovative game model from the Breathe Well group

Communication is a core component of a clinician’s role; however, when clinicians conduct research, communicating the emerging findings and recommendations to different types of stakeholders can be unfamiliar territory. Communicating research to advocate for change can be even more challenging. Clinician researchers seeking to be agents for change need to conceive and craft specific, evidence-based messages and communicate these effectively to different stakeholders to negotiate action. As part of a global health research programme, we developed and tested a novel game-based model to strengthen the communication skills of clinician researchers, from four countries, for improving services for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. This model focused on communication with three key stakeholder groups for knowledge translation: Patients/carers, healthcare providers and policy makers/healthcare managers. Delivered through a series of facilitated, online meetings, this model consisted of two parts: developing and rehearsing advocacy messages with coaching support, and then testing them with a panel of three representative stakeholders, and an audience of fellow researchers. All the country teams reported increased confidence in crafting advocacy messages for specific stakeholders and have applied lessons learned from the model. Delivering this model within a global health research programme requires mentoring, time, commitment, resources and translation support to address language barriers. It offers an exemplar to build the communication skills of clinician and non-clinician researchers so that they can go beyond dissemination towards translation of evidence into policy and practice.