Learning from one another to bridge the "know-do gap"

doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7475.1189

BMJ 2004;329:1189 (13 November), doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7475.1189

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Learning from one another to bridge the "know-do gap"

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The "know-do gap" is a new term to describe an old problem:the gap between what we know and what we do in practice. Butthe term can mean many different things, not least dependingon who the "we" refers to—a farmer in Nepal, doctor inNairobi, health educator in New York, the World Health Organization,the biomedical community, the Catholic Church, or the Presidentof South Africa. Gaps also exist between what a profession asa whole knows and what individual professionals know to be relevantto their practice and between people's awareness of health risksand their actual behaviour.

The main approach to bridge these gaps continues to be to pushinformation out, whether to "get health information to developingcountries," to "translate research into practice," or just to"get our message across." This approach has limited success.It is not only the "target population" that needs . . . [Full text of this article]

Neil Pakenham-Walsh, senior programme manager

International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications health@inasp.info