Hello and welcome to my blog!

Hi, my name is Vicky Ward and I’m an academic based in the UK at the Leeds Institute of Health Sciences. Thanks for taking the time to have a look at my blog! I’m using this first post to tell you a little bit about my research and what I will be covering in future posts, with the aim of whetting your appetite and hopefully enticing you to follow my musings. You can find out a bit more about me here.

I do research on how people working in health and social care (e.g. nurses, social workers, therapists, managers, decision makers and academics) share knowledge with each other. The technical (and rather un-snappy) term for my research area is ‘Knowledge Mobilisation’ which is essentially about moving knowledge to where it can be most useful. I’m especially interested in how people share practical or practice-based knowledge and know-how with one another (i.e. what they know and what they do), rather than how research findings are shared and used. In the past I’ve looked at things like how managers create knowledge about tackling unhealthy behaviour and how mental health teams share knowledge. At the moment I’m looking at how teams of nurses, doctors, therapists and social workers can be supported to share knowledge with each other.

I’m using this blog as a way of helping me to reflect on a whole range of questions about sharing and mobilising knowledge. I’ll be sharing thoughts and ideas about the theories, practices and challenges of mobilising knowledge and doing knowledge mobilisation research including

• What kind of knowledge mobiliser are you?
• Doing KM research: the challenges of being ‘here to help’
• Involving ‘users’ in KM research

I hope that these will spark interest and debate and would love it if you would share your thoughts and ideas with me, either by adding comments or contacting me directly. Click the links below to follow me on Twitter or via email.