Addressing epistemic injustice in HIV research: a call for reporting guidelines on meaningful community engagement

Introduction Despite the widely recognized ethical and practical benefits of community engagement in HIV research, epistemic injustice persists within the field. Namely, the knowledge held by communities disproportionately affected by HIV is systematically afforded less credibility than that of more privileged academic researchers. In order to illustrate what this looks like in practice, we synthesized the extent of reporting on community engagement within recent high-impact HIV intervention research papers. However, we also posit that the HIV research sector has the potential to devise and showcase world-leading examples of equitable research-community partnerships and suggest actionable key steps to achieving this goal. Discussion In the absence of reporting requirements within the publishing process, it is difficult to infer whether and how the community have been consulted in the design, implementation, analysis and/or interpretation of findings. As an illustrative exercise, we offer a rapid synthesis of the extent of reporting on community engagement in HIV research from 2017 to 2019, which highlighted sporadic and very low rates of reporting of community engagement in recent high-impact HIV intervention studies. Of note is that none of the included studies reported on community engagement through all stages of the research process. There were also discrepancies in how community involvement was reported. We provide three actionable recommendations to enhance reporting on community engagement in HIV research: (1) community-led organizations, researchers and scientific journals should band together to develop, publish and require adherence to standardized guidelines for reporting on community involvement in HIV research; (2) research funders should (continue to) require details about how relevant communities have been engaged prior to the submission of funding requests; and (3) researchers should take proactive measures to describe their engagement with community organizations in a clear and transparent manner. Conclusions There is a clear and urgent need for guidelines that facilitate transparent and consistent reporting on community engagement in HIV intervention research. Without standardized reporting requirements and accountability mechanisms within the research sector, the extent of meaningful community engagement cannot be established and may remain a catchphrase rather than reality

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

The third sector delivery of social services: needs, effectiveness and strategies for improvement

Background The third sector is expanding and becoming a bigger provider of public, social and health care services. However, little research has been undertaken to date to evidence the ability of third sector organisations (TSOs) as substitute health and social care providers to work effectively and in accordance with evidence-based practice (EBP). This entails having established processes for monitoring service delivery and outcomes, and including relevant stakeholders with the best available evidence in decision-making processes. Whilst the principles of EBP are gradually becoming an accepted part of practice in health and social care settings, little is known about how these principles have transferred into the third sector. To meet the growing demand on health and social care as a result of changes such as ageing populations, such services are increasingly delivered in quasi-markets, which are markets where public, for-profit, and third sector providers compete for service contracts financed by the state. Research convention and theories on the typology of sector have long contended that organisations across sector are driven by different incentives, but it remains unclear how, if at all, sector specific traits influence service quality. Further, little research has investigated the implications associated with the use of quasi-markets and whether certain types of service providers deliver systematically higher value than others. Objectives This thesis aims to inform these areas by conducting two systematic reviews, which will be operationalised as an evaluation of the factors influencing the ability of TSOs to (1) evaluate their activities and (2) implement evidence-based interventions. (3) The thesis then tests whether quality-related outcomes vary across for-profit, public and third sector organisations in the context of social care organisations in Scotland. These three pieces of research have been developed and written as stand-alone journal articles for publication, bookended by chapters that will engage in a broad discussion of the core issues on the topic and of the core research questions. Together, these three papers provide an important and novel contribution to the existing literature by identifying, appraising, and synthesising existing research on the evaluation and delivery issues of TSOs, while also empirically exploring whether quality outcomes differ across public, for-profit, and third sector social care providers. Methods A variety of methods are employed throughout the thesis. Papers 1 and 2 are systematic reviews conducted following best practice and in line with PRISMA guidelines. Both reviews included systematically searching key databases using relevant search strings, contacting experts, and reviewing websites. All included literature was quality appraised and synthesised using thematic analysis. Paper 3 employed generalised ordered logit models utilising data from the Care Inspectorate (the independent regulator of care services in Scotland) to test whether service- related outcomes vary across for-profit, public and third sector organisations. All papers were reported following best practice guidelines. Results Paper 1 identified the main barriers for TSOs undertaking evaluation to be related to the lack of financial resources, lack of technical capability and evaluation literacy, and challenges around identifying relevant evaluation systems and outcome indicators. Key facilitating factors involved securing the appropriate support and having an organisational culture that supports evaluation, in addition to the motivation to be accountable to stakeholders. This paper has been published in Systematic Reviews. Paper 2, which focused on factors influencing the ability of TSOs to implement evidence-based interventions (EBIs), identified resource limitations, in particular staff and finance, to be the most reported barrier to TSOs implementing EBIs. Organisational culture, including factors such as alignment between the mission of the TSO and EBI, and support/prioritisation of the implementation process, were the most reported facilitators. This paper has been published in Implementation Science. Paper 3 found that public and third sector social care providers were generally more likely to be rated of high quality and of lower risk, compared to for-profit organisations, which were more likely to be rated of adequate quality and of higher risk. This paper has been published in BMJ Open. Discussion The findings of these three studies suggest that from a regulation perspective, the large range of different activities within the third sector makes it challenging to develop policies that are appropriate to all types of TSOs. While policy-makers and academics continue to emphasise the importance of the third sector in alleviating social issues, TSOs are subject to little and insufficient guidance and support on how to evaluate and implement their services in accordance with best practice. This lack of clarity and support regarding how TSOs should adhere to best practice is problematic and may largely be at the expense of the beneficiaries; most of whom include vulnerable population groups. The findings presented in this thesis constitute a novel contribution to the knowledge-base regarding the current state of affairs in the third sector delivery of health and social care services, and also informs theories on the typology of sector. However, the findings should be interpreted with caution as a result of the study limitations, which are discussed in full. Further, the practical and policy implications identified in each paper provide an important resource for key stakeholders in terms of future strategies for regulation and improved guidance/support. As such, the findings do not just have academic relevance in terms of improving the evidence-base with regard to existing evaluation, implementation and quality practices among TSOs, but also inform practice in terms of current debates about how the needs of TSOs can be met going forward.</p

The third sector delivery of social services: needs, effectiveness and strategies for improvement

Background The third sector is expanding and becoming a bigger provider of public, social and health care services. However, little research has been undertaken to date to evidence the ability of third sector organisations (TSOs) as substitute health and social care providers to work effectively and in accordance with evidence-based practice (EBP). This entails having established processes for monitoring service delivery and outcomes, and including relevant stakeholders with the best available evidence in decision-making processes. Whilst the principles of EBP are gradually becoming an accepted part of practice in health and social care settings, little is known about how these principles have transferred into the third sector. To meet the growing demand on health and social care as a result of changes such as ageing populations, such services are increasingly delivered in quasi-markets, which are markets where public, for-profit, and third sector providers compete for service contracts financed by the state. Research convention and theories on the typology of sector have long contended that organisations across sector are driven by different incentives, but it remains unclear how, if at all, sector specific traits influence service quality. Further, little research has investigated the implications associated with the use of quasi-markets and whether certain types of service providers deliver systematically higher value than others. Objectives This thesis aims to inform these areas by conducting two systematic reviews, which will be operationalised as an evaluation of the factors influencing the ability of TSOs to (1) evaluate their activities and (2) implement evidence-based interventions. (3) The thesis then tests whether quality-related outcomes vary across for-profit, public and third sector organisations in the context of social care organisations in Scotland. These three pieces of research have been developed and written as stand-alone journal articles for publication, bookended by chapters that will engage in a broad discussion of the core issues on the topic and of the core research questions. Together, these three papers provide an important and novel contribution to the existing literature by identifying, appraising, and synthesising existing research on the evaluation and delivery issues of TSOs, while also empirically exploring whether quality outcomes differ across public, for-profit, and third sector social care providers. Methods A variety of methods are employed throughout the thesis. Papers 1 and 2 are systematic reviews conducted following best practice and in line with PRISMA guidelines. Both reviews included systematically searching key databases using relevant search strings, contacting experts, and reviewing websites. All included literature was quality appraised and synthesised using thematic analysis. Paper 3 employed generalised ordered logit models utilising data from the Care Inspectorate (the independent regulator of care services in Scotland) to test whether service- related outcomes vary across for-profit, public and third sector organisations. All papers were reported following best practice guidelines. Results Paper 1 identified the main barriers for TSOs undertaking evaluation to be related to the lack of financial resources, lack of technical capability and evaluation literacy, and challenges around identifying relevant evaluation systems and outcome indicators. Key facilitating factors involved securing the appropriate support and having an organisational culture that supports evaluation, in addition to the motivation to be accountable to stakeholders. This paper has been published in Systematic Reviews. Paper 2, which focused on factors influencing the ability of TSOs to implement evidence-based interventions (EBIs), identified resource limitations, in particular staff and finance, to be the most reported barrier to TSOs implementing EBIs. Organisational culture, including factors such as alignment between the mission of the TSO and EBI, and support/prioritisation of the implementation process, were the most reported facilitators. This paper has been published in Implementation Science. Paper 3 found that public and third sector social care providers were generally more likely to be rated of high quality and of lower risk, compared to for-profit organisations, which were more likely to be rated of adequate quality and of higher risk. This paper has been published in BMJ Open. Discussion The findings of these three studies suggest that from a regulation perspective, the large range of different activities within the third sector makes it challenging to develop policies that are appropriate to all types of TSOs. While policy-makers and academics continue to emphasise the importance of the third sector in alleviating social issues, TSOs are subject to little and insufficient guidance and support on how to evaluate and implement their services in accordance with best practice. This lack of clarity and support regarding how TSOs should adhere to best practice is problematic and may largely be at the expense of the beneficiaries; most of whom include vulnerable population groups. The findings presented in this thesis constitute a novel contribution to the knowledge-base regarding the current state of affairs in the third sector delivery of health and social care services, and also informs theories on the typology of sector. However, the findings should be interpreted with caution as a result of the study limitations, which are discussed in full. Further, the practical and policy implications identified in each paper provide an important resource for key stakeholders in terms of future strategies for regulation and improved guidance/support. As such, the findings do not just have academic relevance in terms of improving the evidence-base with regard to existing evaluation, implementation and quality practices among TSOs, but also inform practice in terms of current debates about how the needs of TSOs can be met going forward.</p

Les Tablettes d'Avignon et de Provence : revue hebdomadaire illustrée de propagande régionaliste par Avignon, centre de tourisme

30 octobre 19371937/10/30 (N597BIS).Appartient à l’ensemble documentaire : PACA