An urgent need for technology and knowledge transfer through an intentional collaboration between developed and developing countries is a widely recognised priority, as evident in growing numbers of funding opportunities to enable it. Reasons extent beyond the principle of justice into pragmatism of taking a shared responsibility for global health problems and global research waste. While little evidence exists and let alone a strategy to attempt to address various challenges in capacity building through technology and knowledge transfer, to date much still depends on a small scale initiatives to bridge this gap. In line with the University of Aberdeen global outlook, the HSRU is committed to embedding our culture of internationalisation across all our activities - one of the reasons why I left last year Ribeirão Preto where I worked for the University of São Paulo (Brazil) to Aberdeen to work for the HSRU. Having done so, I hoped that someday there might be a chance to bring the two institutions together. An opportunity arose this month through an invitation of the Ribeirão Preto College of Nursing, University of São Paulo (EERP-USP) for me to present at the XV International Meeting on Mental Health and Specialists in Psychiatric Nursing in Ribeirão Preto.
Following much interest expressed by the audience of my talk about implementation research, specifically evaluation of scalability of an implementation programme, I later delivered also a lecture on a behavioural approaches to identifying barriers and facilitators. Over the course of a week I evaluated and advised several research projects undertaken by keen health care students or professionals. Next, together with Dr. Joao Mazzoncini de Azevedo-Marques and Dr Ana Carolina Guidorizzi Zanette, I’ve aligned with interests of the HSRU their research agenda to optimise and implement integrated and person-cantered care in health systems. My visit was concluded with a meeting with Juliana Gazzotti from the International office of the EERP-USP. During which, with a permission of the IAHS’s director Prof Amanda Lee, I’ve learned about opportunities for an institutional partnership with the EERP-USP and Ribeirão Preto Medical School (FMRP-USP), as per excellent examples of the WHO, University of Michigan, University of Alberta and others. Overall, I recognised that, as the EERP-USP and FMRP-SP have a direct important impact on health care provision though local health services, they are potentially excellent partners in conducting action research and advancing implementation science. Much enthusiasm has been expressed by the other site for a possibility to learn from the IAHS’s expertise in applying science to improve health care and disease prevention. TBC (I hope)
Ps. Lots of samba and love were indeed involved.
Acknowledgments: I’m grateful to the organisers for the invitation and to HSRU’s director Prof Craig Ramsay for supporting this initiative. As a HSRU’ fellow I’m funded by its core funding (the CSO). The costs of my trip were covered by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES- a Brazilian federal government agency under the Ministry of Education).